Does Femtech Give Users Control of Their Health or Take It Away?
T the 2015 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, many humans celebrated as the iPhone Health app eventually diagnosed durations. Menstruation-tracking had been a much-asked characteristic, one which the tech large become rightly criticized for not, such as when it introduced the app the year earlier than. Apple became some thing of a holdout within the market, as was Fitbit, which didn’t upload “girl fitness tracking” until May 2018. But utilizing 2013, period trackers like Clue, Glow, and Period Diary had already been viable options.
And because then, fertility-tracking gadgets like Bellabeat, OvuSense, Daysy, Tempdrop, and Ava have in addition saturated the “femtech” market, giving the current man or woman a sublime, tech-savvy answer for monitoring their frame. Trackers without a hardware issue (in preference to Fitbit and its ilk) work through asking customers to enter statistics like when their durations start and cease, how heavy their cycles are, and associated factors like mood, sexual activity, bodily pain, frame temperature, and pulse. Some fertility-oriented apps even ask users to log their sexual positions.
As with all health apps, duration trackers’ efficacy depends on how good deal facts a consumer is willing to feed it: “The extra records you input, the extra correct your predictions,” as Glow puts it. “Finally apprehend your body,” guarantees Ava. The motivation behind femtech apps is comprehensible. Access to both abortion and prescription beginning management remains out of reach for plenty of ladies and others in need; some politicians nonetheless see every girl’s body as a “host.” In this feel, generation can assist people to advantage greater business enterprise over their personal fitness—and now not best because it applies to duplicate. For instance, the Apple Watch’s EKG feature can flag capability coronary heart issues, that is critical, notes Sloan Gaon, CEO of the fitness records and era organization PulsePoint, for the reason that coronary heart sickness kills one in four ladies.