Siddhi Pandey, an assistant professor of economics, always had a regular period. Then, in March last year, it all changed. “I started experiencing irregular periods after the covid-induced lockdown and work from home began,” she says. So, she turned to My Calendar, an application that helps women track their menstrual cycle, including ovulation and fertile days. “I wanted to assess the extent of irregularity to determine whether there was reason to worry,” says Pandey, who has never used an app to track her period before this one.
Period apps like My Calendar are perhaps the best-known segment for femtech, a relatively recent umbrella term for products and services that use technology to cater to women’s needs, specifically those concerning health and wellness. While mobile phone apps that keep track of fertility and pregnancy account for more than 50% of the femtech market, the term, first coined in 2016 by Ida Tin, co-founder and CEO of menstruation-tracking app Clue can be applied to multiple tools, wearables and applications that focus on general health, wellness, fertility, pregnancy, sexual health, female pleasure, feminine hygiene, diseases, and more.
Read more at: Why we need femtech