Tag: FemTech

Femography and Cambridge Design Partnership

Collaborating to improve lives through innovation

October 18th 2023
Abby Scheer

Abby Scheer 

Consultant Industrial Designer

Martha Hodgson 

Over the last few years, Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) has developed a strategic partnership with MAS Holdings, South Asia’s largest apparel tech company.

Our most recent collaboration has been with Femography, the FemTech division of MAS Holdings, which started out as a small team with diverse expertise, and has evolved into the FemTech arm of the Company. Femography leverages 35 years of apparel tech expertise and works with some of the world’s biggest brands to create innovative apparel solutions that focus on addressing the unseen and unmet needs of women. These innovative solutions are breaking taboos through their textile technology and mission-led practices. The partnership between CDP and Femography combines ingenuity and cross-disciplinary approaches to rapidly create and expand access to impactful women’s health solutions.

Our partnership with Femography was focused on the identification of white space opportunities within menstruation. This leveraged our combined passion and commitment to innovation within the women’s health space. The outcome resulted in a creative solution pipeline which has extended and elevated Femography’s product pipeline.

In this article, Abby Scheer, an Industrial Designer and FemTech Lead at CDP, reflects on the importance of strategic partnerships with Femography’s Tehani Renganathan and Ginnymarie Mendis, and shares exciting key learnings for successful innovation across the FemTech space.

The role of strategic partnerships in successful FemTech innovation

Strategic partnerships provide multi-faceted value, especially in driving innovation that helps transform lives. The partnership between CDP and Femography includes a shared vision that challenges taboos and pre-existing social norms surrounding the female body and increases the discovery and development of impactful solutions.

“We partnered with companies and consultants who really shared that vision, they were vested in this journey with us – and it is that success that we see the fruit of today.” – Tehani Renganathan, Chief of Strategy, Marketing and New Ventures, Femography

Backed by science and approved by women, Femography designs everyday lifestyle solutions across all phases of the feminine journey – from menarche to menopause and everything in-between. Femography’s solutions are created to help women live confidently in their bodies, but many taboos continue surrounding feminine health and well-being.

“Our efforts aren’t focused on creating just a regular clothing/apparel solution, but to also look at solving unmet and undermet needs of our consumers. We have understood the many pain points they journey through, and we are continuously working towards giving them a passive or active solution that can restore normalcy for them.” — Ginnymarie Mendis, Chief of Consumer and Product Innovation, Femography.

Strategic collaborations with insightful partners increase the breadth and depth of discovery and development of impactful solutions – this is especially important in the FemTech space where research and funding is often lacking. Femography approached CDP for expertise in the consumer health and technology space, and together we met this menstrual health challenge head-on.

Building a successful strategic partnership

Drawing on her firsthand experience, Ginny shared how a successful partnership should have “…mutual trust, respect, and a shared vision and commitment to the journey”. When it comes to innovation, it is also important to have a creative partner who can help bring early ideas and concepts to life as fast as possible. CDP’s innovation, efficiency, and approach were a foundational aspect of the partnership formed between CDP and Femography.

“We wanted to bridge our strengths with your [CDP’s] strengths and come up with even greater solutions and innovations that could really have an incremental impact on our planet” – Ginnymarie Mendis.

Femography also recognizes that strategic partnerships are key to successfully expanding its existing portfolio into everyday periodwear and even period swimwear in a meaningful way. When looking to expand into new customer markets across, for example, US, EU, Australia, and Asia, fine-tuning product categories is key.

The FemTech knowledge, cross-cutting sector expertise, and user-centered design approaches which CDP brings to their strategic partnerships has helped to unlock how existing solutions can meet users’ needs and support the rapid discovery of transformative solutions for growing women’s health issues.

New innovation opportunities in FemTech apparel

Reflecting on our recent collaboration, Tehani highlighted the exciting and anticipated new opportunities which can be created and unlocked due to our partnership.

“The CDP and Femography partnership will help create and unlock access to non-medical alternatives to help women better manage their health. An important objective includes exploring a broad product landscape, creating a pipeline of global solutions mapped to symptoms and other pain points women struggle with.” -Tehani Renganathan.

Equally, Tehani reflected on a fantastic launch that the Femography team is exceptionally proud of. Become, the consumer-facing menopause brand of Femography that was launched in the UK almost 7 years ago, was transformational in helping to get the menopause conversation started. Become frequently partners with other brands and organizations to lead change, providing another great example of the importance of innovation collaborations. This year Femography has expanded the Become footprint to the US market to leverage American women’s vocal conversations on menopause, increase awareness of the topic, and provide a solution to women who need it.

What next?

Much more work is still needed to address the health needs of women in the UK and US, and even more so in many developing and underprivileged communities. The collaboration between CDP and Femography continues to help innovate and expand the reach of unique solutions in women’s health across each sub-sector market. Together, CDP and Femography will strive to collaboratively innovate meaningful products, to help bring greater health, dignity, and confidence to all feminine bodies.

Consumer Healthcare

Demystifying FemTech innovation: your questions answered

August 18th 2022
Sukie Whitehall

Sukie Whitehall 

Consultant Mechanical Engineer

In an exciting first half of 2022, our FemTech team attended and presented at conferences, including the Reproductive Health Innovation Summit in Boston and the Women’s Health Innovation Summit in Basel. We’ve enjoyed fascinating conversations at events like these, covering everything from whether ‘FemTech’ is a useful term to how FemTech can manage the gender data gap. In this article, we share our responses to some of those questions which stood out to us.

Is ‘FemTech’ the right term to use to discuss this space?

Yes – and no. The term ‘FemTech’ has been a valuable tool since Ida Tin coined it in 2016, but it can narrow the field of focus. FemTech gives investors a framework and ‘safe’ vocabulary to discuss women’s health issues – some people find “I’m investing in FemTech” easier to say than “I’m investing in a period tracker.” A Google search on the term shows that it has evolved into a rallying point for like-minded people in the industry to find each other and drive innovation. At CDP, we view FemTech as a design philosophy underpinned by inclusivity, experience-led design, and the smart integration of tech (or intentional absence of tech), which we overlay on wide-ranging areas of innovation.

How important is it that FemTech designs for the planet?

We can look at how FemTech has grown due to an increasing consumer focus on sustainability. Menstrual cups, for example, have been around for a long time but only recently become a mainstream product. In 2018, the global menstrual cups market amounted to an estimated US$1.2 billion – it’s expected to reach US$1.89 billion by 2026. This increase reflects a massive shift in consumer attitude towards prioritizing sustainability over the last few years. But it also shows the success of products that meet user needs. Menstrual cups generally need to be changed less frequently than conventional tampons, so they meet user needs and offer a sustainable alternative. [1] At CDP, our user-centered design approach means we design for people, first understanding what they are trying to achieve, before translating contextual insight into solutions.

How is FemTech managing the gender data gap?

Historically, medical studies have often assumed the male body as the default, ignoring that women have different physiologies and responses to disease. This has resulted in a lack of data focusing on women’s needs, which puts FemTech innovators at a disadvantage. On the other hand, it also presents an opportunity for the industry to create valuable proprietary data which can be shared to further the understanding of women’s health. Take the vastly under-researched area of female sexual pleasure – the first comprehensive anatomical study of the clitoris was only published in 1998. [2] For Goodness Sake is the parent company of OMGYes, an education app focused on female sexual pleasure. In partnership with Indiana University and Kinsey Institute researchers, it researches people’s most intimate and vulnerable experiences. The results are published in peer-reviewed journals and (to quote their literature) “turned into honest and friendly online products” – the best of both worlds.

What are some best practices when it comes to developing FemTech products?

The most important thing is not to treat each stage in the innovation journey as a discrete process but to communicate between disciplines and, critically, with consumers and patients – put them at the heart of the innovation process, and validating the new product or service experience. This will ensure that, for example, manufacturing decisions won’t negatively impact user requirements. Our advice is to apply our FemTech philosophy of inclusivity, user-centered design, and the smart integration of tech to a robust end-to-end innovation process, such as CDP’s Potential Realized. This comprises six steps: opportunity definition, concept creation, concept realization, product realization, manufacturing realization, and life-cycle management.

How should emerging FemTech companies approach regulation?

Many FemTech products sit with one foot in healthcare and the other in consumer. Knowing which category your product falls into is key to avoiding unexpected regulation (our white paper on FemTech regulation has more information on this). Consider regulation early, as compliance is complex and expensive to retro-engineer. Negative PR following a regulatory oversight could be catastrophic for a new company or brand, which might otherwise have been successful. And even if you find your product is exempt from regulation, it’s good practice to take a risk-based approach to design to ensure your product remains safe and enjoyable for its end users.

REFERENCES

Connect with CDP

For more on how to design inclusive, experience-led FemTech products that meet the real needs of women, contact Cambridge Design Partnership.

Get in touch
WHITE PAPER

A FemTech innovator’s guide to regulation

BY JESSICA PLATT, HEATHER CARE-SKINNER, STUART CURTIS, BEN STRUTT AND MARTHA HODGSON
A FemTech innovator's guide to regulation|

“Failure to adhere to regulation can cause brilliant products to fail at the last hurdle, miss a launch window, or lose money – and a health- or lifestyle-enhancing design opportunity – through clumsy remedial engineering.”

Searching for a ‘period tracker’ on the Google Play store returns almost two hundred results. Hair removal devices come with companion apps to personalize treatment. Everyday items, such as tampons, may soon save lives by diagnosing disease.

Amid this wave of innovation an essential part of the design process can be overlooked: regulation.

FemTech has three attributes that make it a particular target for regulatory attention: solutions often cross the divide between the consumer and medical sectors, they increasingly deal with sensitive data, and FemTech is dominated by start-ups.

Using a range of case studies in this white paper, we highlight some of the key considerations around regulation – and show FemTech innovators how to robustly build it into the design life-cycle.

A FemTech innovator's guide to regulation|

Download the whitepaper


FemTech : #2 Experience-led design

The three pillars of FemTech success: #2 Experience-led design

March 10th 2022
Cambridge Design Partnership

Cambridge Design Partnership 

In the first of a series of articles covering the three pillars of our FemTech philosophy, we discussed inclusivity. Here, we move on to experience-led design, before ending with the smart use of technology.

Product innovation is shifting focus – from making things to designing seamless experiences. An experience-led design process leads to simple, intuitive, and enjoyable solutions, increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

How a user feels when using a product or service is becoming as important (if not more so) than the solution itself. More than ever, themes such as brand ethical position, purpose, and sustainability credentials are influencing where consumers place their cash and their loyalties. To address this, FemTech innovators must do three things:

  • Understand external influences
  • Focus on the end-to-end user experience
  • Leverage multi-disciplinary perspectives

Understand external influences

Understanding what drives change in the consumer and healthcare space is vital. The challenge for FemTech innovators is to understand how these factors will affect user expectations and behavior.

Take environmental factors: ‘flushability’ has long been a selling point for hygiene products, such as wipes and sanitaryware. However, some manufacturers have drawn historical criticism for stretching the technical definition of flushable to what may be sent on its way with the press of a lever. ‘Solubility’ is a more meaningful definition in the context of the environment and related consumer aspirations. These criteria are determined by industry standards such as Water Industry Specification (WIS) 4-02-06, ‘Fine to Flush’, and other standards with similar objectives across different international legislative jurisdictions.

Sanitary disposal bag firm Fab Little Bags is banking on consumer sentiment changing amid increasing awareness of water pollution. By providing a way to dispose of a tampon in a way that aligns with changing environmental beliefs – binning is better than flushing – it removes eco-guilt and improves the end-user experience.

Regulation is another factor that could affect user experience. If users know that a product, such as a fertility monitor, has been medically approved, they may feel more confident when entrusting it with a potentially life-changing task.

Focus on the end-to-end user experience

User experience isn’t limited to using a product or service but encompasses the whole consumer journey, including product research, purchase, delivery, unboxing, and after-life.

Consumers have ‘Moments of Truth’ during this journey – key points when they form an impression of a brand – and emotional and social drivers can have equal, if not overriding influence, over functional ones. The Zero Moment of Truth occurs during pre-purchase research. The intimate wellbeing e-commerce platform, Bloomi, which screens every product against a checklist of banned ingredients to ensure they meet its clean standards, recognizes the importance of this stage. The attention to the customer experience is continued with the promise of delivery in discreet packaging. Bloomi has designed a customer experience free of anxiety about harmful ingredients and privacy by considering elements of the user journey beyond use.

Leverage multi-disciplinary perspectives

User experience isn’t the remit of front-end innovation alone. Harnessing a multi-disciplinary team allows for a wealth of experience, perceptions, and viewpoints to be incorporated into the end-to-end design process. For example, our designers and engineers accompanied our research team to hear first-hand the frustrations women have when undertaking a breast cancer biopsy. This ensured that we could design an accurate medical tool and an empathetic user experience.

Certain environments, such as innovation sprint programs and start-up incubators, foster multi-disciplinary design. FemTech Labs, the first FemTech accelerator in Europe, is one example. It brings together experts, investors, and business coaches to kickstart FemTech businesses. The FemTech Lab accelerator program is short and intense, supplying opportunities for participants to grow quickly and sustainably by drawing on the expertise of its comprehensive interdisciplinary network.

As we’ve seen from the above examples, many FemTech companies are already prioritizing experience-led design as part of their development process. One of the mentioned case studies, Fab Little Bags, doesn’t ostensibly have any tech in it, which brings us to our upcoming article: the smart use of technology.

References

Connect with CDP

For more on how to design inclusive, experience-led FemTech products that meet the real needs of women, contact Cambridge Design Partnership.

Get in touch
Over-the-counter HRT: Why design matters?

Over-the-counter HRT: Why design matters

February 9th 2022

Jessica Platt 

Ben Strutt 

The recent move by the UK medicines regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), to enable women to pick up hormone replacement therapy (HRT) treatment from a pharmacy without a prescription should be applauded. If rubber-stamped, thousands of women over the age of 50 who suffer from vaginal dryness will no longer need a trip to their doctor for treatment. However, a successful move from prescription (Rx) to over-the-counter (OTC) drug isn’t just a case of administrative reclassification; design also plays an essential part in mitigating risks.

What has design got to do with the success of over-the-counter HRT?

On February 2 2022, the MHRA opened consultation on a proposal to make the prescription-only estradiol vaginal tablet, Gina10, available as a pharmacy medicine. To qualify, a drug must fulfill the following:

  • It must be unlikely to be a direct or indirect danger to human health when used without the supervision of a doctor, even if used correctly.
  • It must not contain substances or preparations of substances where the activity of the product or its side effects require further investigation.
  • It must not normally be prescribed by a doctor for injection (parenteral administration).
  • It must generally be used correctly (i.e. not frequently or to a wide extent used incorrectly).

This last item isn’t a factor of the medicine’s efficacy but mainly of how it is used. The task of helping meet this criterion falls to design. In the absence of a prescribing doctor, factors such as packaging usability, information, instructions, and labeling must step in to support the pharmacist and empower the consumer to make safe and informed choices.

The move to self-health

The commercial opportunity enabled by such redesign is growing – the global Rx to OTC switch market was valued at US$ 33 billion in 2020 and is predicted to expand by over 5% each year between 2021 and 2031.

This will require an industry mindset shift from relying on doctors to pharmacists or consumers themselves. As demonstrated by the widespread adoption of home lateral flow tests during the COVID-19 pandemic, design can be an enabler. Suddenly, the public was expected to carry out and report on a process that previously (most likely) would have been the domain of a medical professional.

We became de facto lab technicians overnight, swabbing younger patients and recording results at the kitchen table. Design was central to the scheme’s success, from letterbox-sized kits to step-by-step graphical instruction books. Lateral Flow Technology made in-home results that would once have been the domain of well-equipped labs, available in minutes.

Their user-friendliness was improved in design iterations, with the introduction of nose-only swab kits and all-in-one buffer solution tubes. Of course, if the tests had been rolled out without the time and cost pressures of a global pandemic, the intuitiveness and usability of the product-pack experience could have been improved. For example, the ever-confusing ‘C’, which clearly means ‘Control’ to scientists, raises the risk of erroneous reporting if interpreted as ‘COVID-19’ by others.

The good news for most pharma companies considering an Rx to OTC switch is that there is time to optimize this experience, thanks (or no thanks) to an often-lengthy reclassification process.

The evolution of the over-the-counter experience

The evolution of the OTC user experience can be demonstrated by another landmark for women’s health: the reclassification of the morning-after pill. When the pill became available in UK pharmacies in 2001, women had to endure a face-to-face interview with a pharmacist in a private side room (which only made the whole process more indiscreet and potentially a barrier to freedom of health choices.) Today, people can order online from multiple consumer-friendly websites for next-day delivery.

Telehealth website ForHims, founded in 2017, achieves the same for men seeking treatment for highly emotive personal problems such as hair loss and erectile dysfunction. An easy-to-navigate website encourages users to fill out a five-minute questionnaire sent to a clinician to approve the requested treatment. Available drugs include Sildenafil and Viagra Connect, which became OTC treatments in the UK in 2018.

A joint effort

The ability to zip into a pharmacy and pick up HRT will be life-changing for many women. There are many candidate drug opportunities with the potential to ‘switch’ in the future, which can only be a good thing for consumers. The design industry will play a critical role working in pharma and regulatory partnerships to ensure this evolving landscape and the packaging and surrounding experience are optimized to best inform and empower those it seeks to benefit.

A landmark for women’s health innovation

There were two victories in the MHRA’s announcement that it’s seeking to reclassify Gina10, an HRT treatment for vaginal dryness, as a non-prescription drug.

The first is that the medical industry is waking up to accessibility needs in healthcare, particularly for women. This group has significantly less free time than men to organize and attend a doctor’s appointment. OTC treatment will make a difference to the 80% of menopausal women who contend with the impact of vaginal dryness on their quality of life.

The second is the medical industry’s increasing willingness to develop a product that addresses the sexual wellness of menopausal women, a traditionally taboo subject. Moreover, the media are willing to talk about this advance for women constructively without the titillating headlines we might have seen in the past.

Both these points mark substantial progress in advancing equality in women’s healthcare.

References

  1. Proposal to make Gina 10 microgram vaginal tablets (Estradiol) available from pharmacies [Internet]. GOV.UK. 2022 [cited 8 February 2022]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consultation-on-proposal-to-make-gina-10-microgram-vaginal-tablets-estradiol-available-from-pharmacies
  2. Rx-to-OTC Switches Market [Internet]. Futuremarketinsights.com. 2021 [cited 8 February 2022]. Available from: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/rx-to-otc-switches-market
  3. Men enjoy five hours more leisure time per week than women – Office for National Statistics [Internet]. Ons.gov.uk. 2018 [cited 8 February 2022]. Available from: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/menenjoyfivehoursmoreleisuretimeperweekthanwomen/2018-01-09
||

The three pillars of FemTech success: #1 Inclusivity

January 28th 2022
Cambridge Design Partnership

Cambridge Design Partnership 

Welcome to the first in a series of articles outlining the three pillars of our FemTech philosophy: inclusion, experience-led design, and the smart integration of technology. Here, we start with inclusion, a crucial topic for success in innovation.

While there are initiatives to ensure gender diversity in the boardroom, there’s rarely the same in product development. This need for equilibrium has historically often been overlooked in market research and product testing, resulting in design that misses a proportion of end-users. For example, it wasn’t until 2011 that female crash test dummies were introduced in the US.

There are three steps to achieving inclusivity in end-to-end innovation:

  • Understand the problem
  • Understand the context
  • Understand the ecosystem

Understand the problem

We use an Insights for Innovation approach underpinned by the ‘jobs to be done’ perspective. This focuses on understanding a task or ‘job’ independently of any existing solutions used to achieve it. This means we start with the problem rather than the solution. For example, our starting question is: ‘What needs might a couple have when trying for a baby?’ (the jobs), rather than ‘How can we design a biometrics tracker to gauge fertility?’ (a solution).

This solution-agnostic approach involves defining a ‘job’ in terms of the user’s functional, emotional, and social needs, for example:

  • The functional need to ‘know when I’m ovulating’
  • The emotional need to ‘feel like conception is a natural process’

An excellent example of a solution that has fulfilled these needs is Inne. This fertility monitoring system uses saliva to detect ovulation. Saliva analysis can help women increase the chance of falling pregnant (functional need) by identifying the fertile window each month. It offers clear feedback to reduce anxiety around the results (emotional need) and comes in a discreet format, allowing women to keep their fertility journey private, if they wish to.

Understand the context

FemTech teams must take research beyond quantitative surveys to truly have a clear idea of a woman’s needs. This requires in-depth qualitative interviews to understand women as part of a contextual system. This recognizes that women don’t buy a product because of who they are; no two women are the same; the same person can have different needs in different contexts.

We believe the team behind the breastmilk expresser Elvie Pump took this approach by considering the context of when it would be used, for example, while running after a child or in the workplace. This revealed needs far beyond extracting milk.

Historically, breast pumps have been cumbersome and noisy, with long tubes that significantly restrict movement. On the other hand, Elvie Pump’s design is hands-free, silent, cordless, and easy to clean. By addressing context, the design became a market leader in the US and UK.

Understand the ecosystem

Understanding the ‘job to be done’ as part of an ecosystem helps multi-disciplinary teams consider the experience of other key stakeholders.

Take the example of contraception; a heterosexual couple might have the same emotional need to ‘feel like contraception is natural’. However, to one, it could mean hormone-free cream; to the other, it might mean no physical intervention at all (for example, relying on a fertility monitor). Addressing the need from different perspectives ensures the solution is meaningful, intuitive, and enjoyable for everyone it impacts.

The Maven Clinic is a telehealth platform that offers fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and family care services. It caters to what would largely be considered female needs. However, 30% of its members are men. Founder Kate Ryder is careful not to exclude them when she talks about the platform. Rather than referring to Maven Clinic as FemTech, she defines her mission in terms of “people” to ensure that all members feel included.

As these examples show, inclusivity is an essential ingredient of FemTech success. The following articles in our series will cover why experience-led design and the smart integration of technology are equally important.

References
  • Criado Perez C. The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes [Internet]. The Guardian. 2019 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes
  • Science [Internet]. Inne.io. 2022 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.inne.io/en/science
  • Elvie Pump: from idea to execution [Internet]. Elvie. 2019 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.elvie.com/en-gb/blog/elvie-pump-from-idea-to-execution
  • Srivastava A. British femtech Elvie lands £58M funding for its smart breast pumps and more – UKTN | UK Tech News | [Internet]. UKTN | UK Tech News |. 2021 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.uktech.news/news/british-femtech-elvie-funding-20210727
  • Maven – The next generation of care for women and families [Internet]. Mavenclinic.com. 2022 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.mavenclinic.com/
  • Pallarito K. ‘Femtech’ Is Busting Taboos Around Women’s Health and Wellness—But What Is It Exactly? [Internet]. Health.com. 2020 [cited 10 January 2022]. Available from: https://www.health.com/mind-body/femtech-womens-health

Connect with CDP

For more on how to design inclusive, experience-led FemTech products that meet the real needs of women, contact Cambridge Design Partnership.

Get in touch
FemTech||

Realizing the potential of FemTech – your questions answered

August 10th 2021

Jessica Platt 

Martha Hodgson 

In our webinar, Realizing the potential of FemTech, CDP’s Martha Hodgson and Jessica Platt gave their take on the principles of FemTech, and how forerunners are implementing them to succeed.

Here, Martha, Senior Insight & Strategy Consultant, and Jessica, Associate Insights Researcher, share more ideas, answering questions sparked by their presentation.

How important are digital security and data privacy in FemTech innovation?

Jessica: Digital security and data privacy are hugely important – so many FemTech products are linked to the internet and share information. They should be part of any design process from the start. Mishandling them can be costly. For example, a leading sex toy maker ran into trouble when their remote-controlled Bluetooth vibrator was found to be vulnerable to hackers who could take control of the product. They also shared data about the temperature of the vibrator with their parent company. As a result, they were ordered to make huge pay-outs to customers.

The Internet of Things poses challenges for internet products – how do you recommend we deal with them?

Jessica: Regulation and privacy are exciting areas because brands can become pioneers in these spaces. There’s a vast knowledge gap around women’s health, and the data FemTech collects should be used for research, but it must be done carefully. Transparency is key. Users should be empowered and told how their data will be used, stored, and shared – and not in pages of terms and conditions that most users accept without reading.

Your presentation highlighted that people have functional, social, and emotional needs – which are most important for FemTech to meet?

Martha: When you’re thinking about the importance of a need, consider the context. Also, you should know how well existing products are meeting that need. A highly important need might already be being met with a high level of satisfaction. Some exciting innovations have come from focusing on highly important needs that are being met with low levels of satisfaction – or needs of low importance that are being met with (overly) high levels of satisfaction. For example, budget airlines disrupted the travel industry by understanding that in-flight meals are of low importance to their customers on short-haul flights, so they strip them out to offer a low-price service. In FemTech, experienceis as important as the tangible product, or even more so. Therefore, think about current levels of satisfaction and explore needs being over- and under-served by existing solutions.

How can FemTech leverage existing technology?

Martha: A lot of amazing innovations are the result of transferable learnings. The answer isn’t always new technology. Sometimes, it comes from looking at a problem differently and seeing that you could reapply an existing solution to deliver a different value in a different context. So, take a step back from the technology. Understand that it’s a point-in-time solution to a problem. Then, take a solution-agnostic approach to the job you’re trying to do.

How can we deliver excitement when repurposing existing technology?

Martha: Experience is shaped by all five of our senses, so think about the sensorial experience when translating consumer needs into solutions. Also, be aware of pre-existing mental models – shaped by culture, environment, influencers and so on – and how far consumers are willing to stretch these. Take sanitary products. There are loads of new, exciting materials that are thinner, more flexible, and more absorbent than those used today. However, mental models around security and comfort might mean users won’t willingly go down these routes, even though they might provide a better solution. Excitement doesn’t just come from technology enablers but understanding the outcome as a series of sensory attributes and translating these into experiences.

There are many tech innovations around infertility, and it seems other areas are being ignored. Is this true? If so, why?

Jessica: FemTech Focus define FemTech as “Technology, services, and products that improve women, females, and girls’ health and wellness. This includes addressing challenges that solely, disproportionately, or differently affect them.” This is my starting point when thinking about FemTech, and it tells you how inclusive FemTech is – it’s not limited to fertility and menstruation, though a lot of attention has been focussed on these. There are opportunities around conditions that affect women differently. For example, heart attacks have different symptoms in women. This means women’s heart attacks are sometimes missed or treated later, resulting in worse outcomes. FemTech solutions that address heart health might help mitigate these adverse outcomes.

Why does only a small percentage of investment in digital health go to FemTech?

Jessica: FemTech is relatively new – there have only been a handful of billion-dollar exits. So, there’s still a long way to go to educate investors that FemTech is lucrative, and products and services designed to meet women’s needs aren’t niche. However, we’re on the cusp of a transformation in the way FemTech is funded.

Martha: Changing investors’ perceptions of FemTech needs us to think about how we communicate the opportunity. Industries must be able to see long-term commercial profit. The needs that FemTech addresses are stable and shared by 51% of the population – this helps explain the long-term gains that could be made through FemTech investment.

Is FemTech only about healthcare and sexual health?

Martha: Absolutely not. Take the sports industry. Women’s sport has been on a growth trajectory, and there are many examples of women-focused services and products thriving based on the ergonomics, size, and shape of women’s bodies. Women’s football-boot maker IDA Sports’ tagline is spot on: “You are not an afterthought”. Traditional category borders are blurring, which is opening exciting innovation opportunities, like FemTech. Seeing FemTech as an innovation philosophy lets you focus on the needs you can meet – rather than the sector label.

To continue the conversation, get in touch: womenshealth@cambridge-design.com

REFERENCES
Jessica Platt & Martha Hodgson discussing FemTech

Realizing the potential of FemTech

July 14th 2021

Martha Hodgson 

Jessica Platt 

WEBINAR
With Jessica Platt and Martha Hodgson
14 JUL 2021

FemTech is a relatively new and often misunderstood term. Some associate it with products unique to reproductive health. However, it encompasses so much more such as chronic conditions and general healthcare and software, diagnostics, and technology to support women’s health. In addition, there are many other unaddressed women’s health areas that make this sector prime for growth. According to Frost & Sulivan, FemTech has a market potential of $50bn by 2025, while FemTech predictions around the size of the market illustrate the potential in FemTech innovation and the value of inclusive design as we consider the future of this sector.

Join Martha Hodgson and Jessica Platt and explore how the power of inclusive, experience-centered design and smart application of technology has accelerated the rise of FemTech.

During this webinar, you’ll learn about the sector’s growth and how an increasing focus on FemTech solutions will offer far-reaching opportunities to define new products, services, and technology experiences that improve women’s lives through meaningful consumer and healthcare innovation.

Watch the webinar

Connect with the speakers

Jessica Platt

FemTech Lead and Associate Insights Researcher

Martha Hodgson

Martha Hodgson

Senior Insights & Strategy Consultant

Key to success in FemTech

The key to FemTech success? Forget about the tech

July 9th 2021

Jessica Platt 

Martha Hodgson 

Ben Strutt 

Nicki Sutton 

From contraception to catheters, at CDP we’ve successfully pioneered women’s health innovation for over a decade.

Now that increasing numbers of our clients are entering the $19bn¹ FemTech market, we’re in a strong position to share some powerful lessons from our established approach to inclusive design.

Refocus your lens

Fertility entrepreneur, Ida Tin, coined the term ‘FemTech’ in 2016 in a frustrated bid to explain her work to male investors. The resulting discussion revealed the breath-taking extent to which the marketplace is short-changing women.

Despite decades of progress in gender equality, product development (until very recently) has operated through a male lens. It wasn’t, for example, until 1993 that the US National Institute of Health made it obligatory to include women in government-funded health research. This lack of data has resulted in a significant knowledge gap in women’s health, meaning that female patients have missed out on critical advances in medical technology.

And it wasn’t just men’s bodies that were the default; it was also the male viewpoint. Take the launch of Apple Health in 2014. The much-anticipated app promised to monitor “all of your metrics that you’re most interested in”. Yet it omitted a menstrual cycle tracking function². This is arguably something of great interest to 50% of its users. It wasn’t until a year and a lot of media pressure later that developers added it in.

Fight assumption with insight

The Apple Health oversight could have been avoided by one simple step – asking women what they thought.

At CDP, we believe the key to design inclusivity lies in a strong front-end innovation (FEI) capability. FEI is the identification and activation of opportunities, and the translation of insights into product and service solutions. This is the function that feeds insight into strategy, design, and specification. Importantly, it can guide decisions made later in the product development cycle.

To put a woman’s needs at the center of a brief, teams must take research beyond quantitative surveys. A mere tick box won’t capture the emotional and social circumstances in which a product is used.

For example, could the tone and volume of the beep that a basal fertility thermometer emits first thing in the morning (when it must be used) be so grating that it results in lower levels of compliance?

We recommend in-depth qualitative interviews to understand people as part of a contextual system, rather than groups of personas. Categorizing a user as a “32-year-old soccer mom from California” fails to capture the nuances of when, where, and how a product is used. As an aside, it also turns out that women take a dim view of being pigeonholed, as a former boss of UK retail chain Marks & Spencer discovered when (to female shoppers’ outrage) he described its typical customer as “Mrs M&S”³.

Where possible, we engage in immersive, ethnographic methodologies – seeing people in their cultural setting, often at home – to uncover user needs. This extends to international travel to understand the cultural contexts that inform decision making in different markets.

Futureproof for regulation

As a young sector, it’s no surprise that there are grey areas when it comes to the regulation of FemTech.

This is slowly changing as FemTech creeps into the realm of (regulated) medical devices. In 2018, Natural Cycles was the first digital birth control app to receive clearance from the FDA; fertility pioneer Clue was the second in March 2021.

Somewhat shockingly, regulation for sex toys doesn’t extend beyond the electrical compliance required for a Bluetooth speaker, escaping more stringent scrutiny through a “novelty use” labelling loophole.

Again, this is set to change, with the ISO making progress towards new standards⁴. Until this is finalized, the regulation of medical devices provides a good clue as to what action is needed to futureproof FemTech.

On a recent sex toy project, CDP ensured that all materials were biocompatible, although no regulations required it. Not only was this the right thing in terms of reducing risk for the user, but also protected our client against potential changes in regulation.

Forget about the tech

It may sound counterintuitive, but at CDP we feel the best way to succeed in FemTech is to forget the tech…at first, anyway. This is where we often see both big corporates and startups trip up.

We recommend a “solution agnostic” approach to design – that’s to say starting with a user need and looking for the best way to fulfil it. This might involve tech; it might not. Even then, the “tech” might not necessarily be digital, which is often what comes to mind when we think of FemTech. Instead, it might focus on the device itself, the manufacturing process, choice of material, or service. Whatever the solution, this method establishes early on if there is a market and business case for a product.

The alternative is “tech for tech’s sake”: just because it’s possible to measure the veracity of the female orgasm doesn’t mean that women want this data, as a startup that claimed to “spot women’s orgasms” found out when it was widely lampooned in the media⁵.

On this, it’s worth noting that we don’t see FemTech as limited to the fields of sex or fertility. The same contextual and experiential empathy that goes into designing for these areas must also be applied to other issues that disproportionally impact women. For example, we recently worked on a minimally invasive breast cancer biopsy device. Our goal was not only to design an accurate medical tool but to consider the experiential needs of the female patient – something that is often ignored.

Consider user acceptance

You’ve established a user need and a great tech-driven solution, but will female consumers feel comfortable using it?

It’s important to consider whether women are culturally ready to adopt a tech-led solution, particularly if it involves intimate wearables or sensitive data.

For example, current technology is capable of analyzing menstrual flow, but are women willing to accept intimate electronics? Let’s remember that in some parts of the world, tampon usage is still taboo.

Baking the female experience into the design process will answer these questions early on.

Ditch the defaults

We’ve discussed reframing design to include females; however, the same principles apply to other areas of inclusivity, such as race, sexuality, disability, gender identity, and economics.

In FemTech, this means considering, for example, the male experience – a heterosexual couple trying for a baby may want the capability for the male to log into a fertility app as part of the shared experience.

Likewise, it means considering the affordability of a design for various socio-economic groups. An expensive pelvic floor trainer may be financially out of reach for many women, so is it possible to reduce costs with smarter manufacturing or a new business model?

Good design considers all perspectives. It’s time to ditch the defaults.

To continue the conversation, get in touch: womenshealth@cambridge-design.com

1 – The Global Femtech Market was valued at $19bn in 2019 and is expected to reach $60bn Billion by 2027, according to Emergen Research.
https://www.emergenresearch.com/industry-report/femtech-market
2 – https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/apple-stops-ignoring-womens-health-with-ios-9-healthkit-update-now-featuring-period-tracking/
3 – https://www.cityam.com/mrs-ms-steve-rowes-first-blunder/
4 – https://www.iso.org/committee/7647858/x/catalogue/p/0/u/1/w/0/d/0
5 – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53024123