Harriet Forsyth is an analyst at ClearViewIP. Her report, Femtech & IP, outlines how insights into the market prove that the femtech trend isn’t a fad and is definitely worth the hype.
When products have the potential to impact roughly 51% of the world’s population can they really be considered niche? For trailblazing innovators and entrepreneurs in the femtech space, designing and developing products and apps for women has until very recently, been considered fringe. They have had to fight against the notion that women aren’t interested in technology, or eager to track and monitor their personal health data to live more comfortable and fulfilling lives. These notions are fortunately changing and a new technology space, as well as innovation opportunities, are emerging.
In the current age of apps and wearables, tracking and monitoring menstrual cycles seems like an obvious application for health tracking technology. Interestingly, this hasn’t been the case. For example, as recently as 2015, Apple was heavily criticised for not including a period tracking feature in its HealthKit app, something it has since rectified.
While femtech includes more than health monitoring technology, this shift towards women’s health aligns well with the next phase of wearable technology applications. The landscape for wearables is changing. In recent years, use of wearables has been on a decline with one study showing that a third of people stop using a wearable within six months of receiving it. Jawbone was liquidated in 2017 and Fitbit also reported a financial loss and announced it would be laying off 6% of its staff. Arguably, the first phase of wearables is ending, and the next phase of data discovery through the use of wearables is taking place. Simply tracking activity is not enough for users anymore, devices that just track activity may get people moving, but they don’t lead to any discovery about what is happening within the body.
“Give it a few years and I think that people will start understanding that having this longitude dataset of your health is going to be an incredibly valuable thing to have — almost like life insurance. Because we will learn to pick up early signals of disease that currently we have no ways to detect early enough — ovarian cancer would be one of them. Which is totally treatable if you catch it early, but it’s hard to catch it early. And I think there will be many more things like this where people will learn to know that collecting data for your health is just a really, really smart thing to do,” Ida Tin, CEO of period tracking app Clue 2017 TechCrunch event in Berlin
Wearable makers are currently creating integrated wearables for trainers, clothes and even beds. There are a lot of health data applications that exist within this technology space. For example, Fitbit’s Ionic sport watch has a new oxygen sensor that they hope will enable them to gather data in order to address sleep apnea. This next phase of wearables is proving to be an ideal opportunity for women’s health tracking products like the Clue app and Bellabeat’s leaf.
A new collaboration between Clue and Fitbit announced in late February 2018 will allow women to start collecting their health data on their wrists. The availability of Clue on Fitbit’s Ionic sport watch is the first period tracking app to be compatible with the Fitbit OS. Based on the internal pilot study, Clue has already been able to spot a correlation with spikes in heart rate and ovulation.
This is highly relevant when you consider the historical context and the lack of female-specific health data available to researchers and medical professionals. Women were not included in medical trials until 1993 as it was thought they may get pregnant during a study and drugs testing could harm a foetus. Even once the ban had been lifted, many studies continued to use all male participants. We, therefore, have far more information on how drugs and diseases affect men than we do for women. The data currently being collected by femtech products could start to address this data void. As many of the discoveries in femtech revolve around tracking and monitoring female health, the data collected could be used to aid medical research. There would be a need to ensure that the data is accurate and reliable, so there is further space for developments in data processing and data science.
The full report can be found here