Focus on FemTech: the changing role of digital technology in women's health

Alex’s research focuses on high-risk pregnancies. Earlier this year, she published a Viewpoint article in The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynaecology & Women’s Health, in which she discussed the origins of FemTech, where it is headed, and hopes for the future.

FemTech may be most strongly associated with reproductive health and menstrual cycle tracking apps, but Alex argues that the field is developing a broader scope, with a new focus on issues such as chronic disease (including cardiovascular disease linked to pregnancy complications), menopause and mental health.

“For a long time, women’s health technologies have focused mainly on fertility and menstrual tracking,” Alex said. “But there is enormous potential to expand that focus towards lifelong health, using digital tools to better understand the links between reproductive health, cardiovascular disease, mental health and chronic illness, areas that have historically been under-recognised and under-researched.”

The word ‘FemTech’ may also conjure up images of advanced technology, but Alex uses examples from her own research to argue that low-cost and community-centred innovations can be incredibly impactful.

“One of the most powerful examples of this for me is the 2YoungLives programme in Sierra Leone,” Alex explained. “We know that adolescent girls account for a huge proportion of maternal deaths globally, often because they’re socially isolated, stigmatised, and reach care too late.”

2YoungLives is a project that pairs pregnant teenagers with trained community mentors, who provide support, help them recognise danger signs, and accompany them into care. The mentors are women from within their own community.

“It’s a simple, human intervention, but when we evaluated it rigorously, we saw improvements in care-seeking, safety and outcomes,” Alex said. “For me, that is FemTech too. It’s an innovation shaped by necessity, enabled by evidence, and designed to close an equity gap that technology alone could never fix.”

Alex was also co-chief investigator, alongside Prof Andrew Shennan, on a study published in The Lancet that demonstrates how a simple device that measures a mother’s blood pressure and pulse can be scaled nationally in Sierra Leone, aiding early detection of maternal complications such as pre-eclampsia (which causes high blood pressure in the mother) and supporting care for around 93,000 births.

The study demonstrated successful national-scale implementation of a low-cost maternal monitoring device, alongside improvements in recognition of high-risk women, referral pathways, and healthcare worker confidence. The findings also highlighted that technology alone is not enough to reduce maternal mortality without simultaneous investment in workforce capacity, referral systems and access to treatment.

These examples of pre-eclampsia interventions also show how FemTech can be incredibly effective in places with lower healthcare coverage.

“Pre-eclampsia is a common and dangerous condition, and for a long time we relied mainly on symptoms and blood pressure alone, which meant many women were diagnosed late,” Alex said. “In the UK, the introduction of placental growth factor testing was a real step change. It helped clinicians identify risk much earlier, decide who needed closer monitoring or delivery, and who could safely go home.”

However, this test can only be done in well-resourced hospitals. To make this care accessible to rural and underserved areas, the innovation came from developing a lower-tech solution: a finger-prick blood test.

“We’re now taking that approach from London to places like Sierra Leone, Zambia and India, and working with industry to make these tests cheaper, faster and robust enough to move care even closer to home,” Alex said. “That’s FemTech responding directly to necessity, not requiring expensive infrastructure, but removing barriers.”

Alex has also appeared on the Lancet Obstetrics, Gynaecology, & Women’s Health podcast, where you can hear her discussing FemTech in more detail.

Historically, many areas of women’s health have been underfunded, under-researched and designed around healthcare systems that fail to reach the women at highest risk. Alex argues that FemTech offers an opportunity not only for innovation, but for redesigning care pathways around equity. Furthermore, innovations developed for low-resource settings may also help address growing inequalities in maternity care within the UK and other high-income countries.

“FemTech can sound like a new or even niche term, but what it’s really doing is bringing long-standing gaps in women’s health into focus,” Alex said. “And that matters, because women’s health has been overlooked for a long time. With the right focus, funding and innovation, it’s an area where we can genuinely drive change. And when you improve women’s health, the benefits ripple outwards, to families, communities and society as a whole.”