FemTech – will it help improve your health?

The new buzz word – FemTech (female technology). What does it mean?

It is a term started by Ida Tin, a Danish entrepreneur who founded the period and fertility tracking app – Clue. It covers products that are aimed at improving women’s health – mainly digital products such as apps, wearables and internet-connected medical devices.

So can they help improve your health, fertility and wellbeing? In this post I am going to concentrate on some of the apps that have been developed for women’s health.

Fitness

There are many types of gadgets and apps to monitor fitness. If you go for a walk, cycle, dance, run, swim – there are apps to measure all of these and to share your activity with your friends.  A moderate amount of activity daily can seriously improve your health, so it is useful to monitor if you have done enough.

I had tried to run for many years but never managed it.  Four years ago I used the couch to 5k app and it got me running.  I was very impressed. I also love the 7 minute workout.

Here are some other fitness apps – Strava running and cycling app, Map my Run, Fitocracy, Gympact, My Fitness Pal, Workout Trainer and Pocketyoga.

I have found it really useful to use a gadget that monitors my exercise output and heart rate as it is really key to increase your heart rate when exercising. I have used a fitbit but now use an Apple watch. It tells me when I have been sitting for too long, when I need to breath (yes I do breath all the time but when you get this message, it reminds you to take some slow, deep breathes), how active I have been, and how many steps I have done.

Do you use a fitness app?

Weight loss

I have been trying out Noom – weight watchers for Millennials. As well as being a really easy way to log your food intake, it easily connects to various devices to monitor your exercise regime, and gives you daily coaching to help keep you on track, with a lot of evidenced based psychology thrown in.

So far I am quite impressed, but have a few issues such as the daily monitoring of how many steps you do (you can walk a lot very slowly and it will not be as beneficial to your health as walking less but quickly). It also wants you to weigh yourself every day. But it is like having a friend constantly on hand and there seems to be a ‘real’ person who messages me regularly and gives me advice and support. And it tells me whether the food I am eating is wrong and gives advice on how I can improve my diet.

There are many other weight loss apps such as Lose it, SparkPeople, My Fitness Pal, and Weight Watchers. Here is a great review of the top 10.

Relaxation

These apps mostly deliver guided meditation or ways to help you sleep. One of the first meditation apps was Headspace and it now has over 1 million users. I have tried this app and really enjoyed it.  Others include 10% Happier, Calm, and Pzizz.

There is a good review of these apps here.

Menstrual cycle

Do you use an app to monitor your menstrual cycle?  One of the first to launch was Clue, which has had 10 million users but now there are many menstrual cycle apps such as Period Tracker, Life, Eve, and Period Log.  You have to log in your date of birth, weight, length of cycle, period date and the app will predict when your next period is and when you are likely to suffer from PMS.

There is a review of some of the menstrual cycle apps here.

I am concerned that most of these calendar based apps claim to tell you when you are your most fertile, but they cannot accurately do this if they simply monitor your menstrual cycle (see next section and read a review here).

Fertility and pregnancy

There are over 100 fertility apps.

The apps that track your menstrual cycle can be turned into fertility apps if they measure your daily temperature as this rises just before ovulation, check the hormone LH (lutenising hormone) which rises just before ovulation, or ask for other ovulation predictors such as cervical mucus changes.

Some of the apps that monitor your temperature are Glow, Daysy, Kindara, Ovia, Conceivable and Natural Cycles. Ava tracks vital signs with a wrist wearable and allows you to follow your pregnancy through to delivery.  Glow has an active user forum for posts on a variety of topics. Conceivable also sells herbal supplements which they claim will increase your chance of getting pregnant.

These apps often claim to increase the chances of getting pregnant, but there have been no published studies confirming this.

There is a funny review of some of the fertility apps here.

Contraception

Any of the above fertility apps can be turned around the other way to act as contraception apps. The first to be accredited and get FDA approval was Natural Cycles. Other apps to market themselves as contraception apps such as Daysy. These apps have had some bad press as pregnancies have occurred when using the app, but they do not claim to be 100% effective methods of contraception.

What apps and gadgets do you use to monitor your health?

Image credit – https://goldmountainbeauty.com/blogs/news/femtech-the-rise-of-a-new-era