How FemTech Is Changing Women’s Health In A Good Way
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FemTech is a relatively new term coined to describe a rising sector of technology focused on women’s health. FemTech includes everything from period and fertility tracking apps like Clue to wearable tech specifically designed for women like Leaf. While tech industries have often been traditionally dominated by men, FemTech is changing the game for women all over the world. Here’s how FemTech is changing women’s health in a good way.
Increased Awareness
Whether we’re talking about an app that tracks fertility cycles or an activity tracker designed specifically for women, FemTech is helping women increase their understanding and awareness of their bodies and their health. Knowledge is power and giving women access to educational information and reliable data about their individual bodies can help them make better and more informed choices about their health and wellness needs. But FemTech isn’t just helping the women who use it. Increases in reliable data on women’s health also helps healthcare professionals make better and more personalize patient recommendations as well as helps them understand broader trends in women’s health.
Reduced Stigma
For a long time women’s health was a largely taboo topic in a patriarchal society. Women themselves were kept in the dark as both society and individuals stigmatized women’s health and female bodies. By increasing awareness and understanding about women’s health, FemTech is continuing to reduce the stigma around topics like menstruation and fertility. With many high profile influencers using and publicly recommending FemTech products, the average women is now seeing her stories and her health taking center stage in public conversations instead of being shoved under the rug.
Focus On Wellness, Lifestyle & Prevention
Many FemTech products, like activity trackers, focus on helping women maintain general wellness and healthy lifestyles in order to prevent future illness and disease. This focus on wellness and lifestyle, which includes everything from meditation resources to sleep trackers and food logs, empowers women to take control of their health. Furthermore, focusing on healthy lifestyles and disease prevention reduces strain on the healthcare system by fostering a happier and healthier population.
It Makes Science Accessible
For a long time the average person has had few resources to help them understand the science of their bodies, making them dependent on the advice and opinions of experts. While FemTech is no substitute for a trained and qualified physician, it does make science more accessible and understandable to the average women, who can now get reliable information and data about her unique and individual body. Though FemTech should never be consulted instead of a doctor, it does give women a better understanding of health sciences so that they can have more informed conversations with healthcare professionals about their personal needs and concerns.
It’s Empowering
Female empowerment is perhaps one of the most exciting things about FemTech. It’s easy to forget that it’s only in the past few decades that women have had reliable and consistent access to healthcare education. While those days are gone, FemTech is taking the power of female education to a whole new level. Not only are women empowered by a better understanding of what’s going on in their bodies, that understanding also empowers them to make better personal choices. For example, the recently FDA approved contraceptive app Natural Cycles is offering women a personalized way to reliably track their fertility and prevent pregnancy naturally, without the use of hormones. For many women who have felt limited by the potential side-effects of hormonal birth control, the natural options offered by FemTech are not just empowering, they’re life changing.
After centuries of being kept in the dark about their bodies and their health, women are striking back with the power of FemTech. For the first time, women have access to reliable and personalize data about their bodies and their health that can help them make better, more informed decisions with the help of their physicians. At the same time, FemTech is encouraging women to adopt more natural lifestyle habits to increase their overall wellness so they can stay happy and healthy for years to come.
