From Period Tracking to Fertility: What Makes Women Use Health Apps

In the last decade, women’s health technology has come a long way. It began as rudimentary period and ovulation trackers, evolving into a highly developed fertility-focused platform with all sorts of services — cycle predictions to conception assistance.

Then what is causing this growth, and more importantly, what is it that makes women actually use these apps? In this article, I will analyze the key factors that influence the adoption and sustained engagement with women’s health platforms, drawing on experience from healthcare software development services to highlight best practices. Features to include in the application are drawn from usage statistics, user interviews, industry reports, app feature analysis, and so on. Core focus areas include:

• Evolution of femtech from period trackers to fertility tools
• Key drivers and needs spurring femtech adoption
• Factors influencing continued and increased usage
• Role of accuracy, privacy, access to experts, etc., in user retention
• How consumer needs are shifting from tracking to planning, prediction and intervention
• Market outlook, opportunities and challenges ahead

The Femtech Growth Trajectory

Femtech grew at a phenomenal rate from $250M in 2015 to around $39.29 billion in 2024. Women’s health technology has been going mainstream since the launch of the popular fertility app Glow in 2013, unicorn startups like Modern Fertility raising more than $160 million in funding, and everything in between.

But how did we get here? Let’s do a quick retrospective first.

The Beginnings – Period Tracking

For most female health apps on the market today, the journey began with period tracking. When Glow first debuted nearly a decade ago, it tapped into an unmet need for women to easily record and analyze their menstrual cycles using their smartphones.

Soon, similar apps such as Clue, Flo, Eve and so on started catching on, allowing women to log not only periods but also moods, symptoms, sexual activity and so on. However, the aggregation of this rich longitudinal data provided groundbreaking views of individual cycles and patterns, underscoring the importance of thoughtful healthtech UX in making that data both accessible and actionable.

It was obvious why – Flo had over 15 million downloads by 2016, and Clue had gotten almost 5 million users. The success of tracking-based apps was the beginning of the shape of women’s health tech that was yet to come.

Pregnancy Planning and Ovulation Tracking

Period trackers showed women their cycles, but the next steps were still left to be determined. The obvious next step was to develop these apps into forward-thinking planning tools designed to achieve things like preventing pregnancy or maximizing the chances of conception.

Since Ovia is a modern fertility app that not just gives a forecast of when you will be ovulating, period, but also provides personalized advice and analysis for effective family planning or getting pregnant faster. This allows users to log basal body temperature, cervical fluid consistency, intercourse details and more for more accuracy.

Many trackers now integrate with wearables and connected devices for passive data collection rather than relying solely on manual logging. They leverage predictive analytics and machine learning on the aggregate data to refine predictions and insights further.

The Market Expands – Fertility, Menopause and More

From ovulation and conception tools, femtech startups have diversified into adjacent women’s health segments:

• Fertility testing: Modern Fertility, EverlyWell, Natalist
• Menopause support: Genneve, Elektra Health
• Pelvic and sexual health: Minna Life, Elvie
• Pregnancy care: Peanut, Expectful
• General women’s wellness: Tia, Willow

Instead of just tracking cycles, these companies provide proactive health screenings, community support, telehealth access, and personalized care plans around issues like family planning, sexual wellness, pregnancy, menopause, and so on.

While some apps have retained an informational focus, newer entrants promise a combination of community support, telehealth access and even prescription delivery at home. The scope spans reproductive health, pregnancy, menopause and overall wellness.

So what exactly is propelling this femtech boom and persuading women to use these health apps? Let’s analyze some key drivers and consumer needs.

What’s Driving Femtech Adoption Among Women

The runaway success of femtech apps points to some clear unmet needs among women that this technology is serving. What core user requirements are these platforms addressing?

Need for Personalized Insights

Every woman’s cycle and reproductive health needs are unique. While medical guidelines exist, they provide blanket recommendations instead of tailored insights. Femtech apps fill this gap.

Personalized predictions and analysis come about through sophisticated algorithms that crunch individual tracking data against crowdsourced benchmarks. It allows women to decode their own patterns and preferences rather than depend on made-up assumptions.

The Desire to Be Proactive

Traditionally, women had to be reactive on reproductive health issues, whether by means of social taboos or medical norms. Using fertility apps enables them to take charge.

Instead of passively waiting for periods, pregnancies or menopause to happen unexpectedly, femtech apps allow women to foresee them and prepare mentally as well as physically.

Modern Fertility found that most of their users joined to understand their fertility proactively instead of waiting until they started trying or faced issues. The ability to drive their own health trajectories draws women to these platforms.

Need for Community Support

Reproductive experiences like pregnancy and menopause can feel emotionally isolating. Women often have nowhere to openly discuss concerns and challenges.

For instance, femtech apps that have community forums, such as Peanut and Gennev, offer solidarity and support from other women who are going through the same experience. A report by L.E.K. Consulting highlights that unmet needs in women’s health often include emotional support, particularly during pregnancy, postpartum, and reproductive health journeys. The apps turn out to serve a dual purpose — tracking health data and also serving as mental health assistance when required.

Convenience and Accessibility

Perhaps the most straightforward driver is that femtech apps offer low effort and high convenience. Instead of scheduling doctors’ visits, waiting for tests or taking time off work, essential health data, advice and interventions are available 24/7 on women’s phones.

Easy connectivity with wearables for automated data collection also minimizes the logging needed. Their usage often increases in tandem with the level of effortless tracking enabled.

The convenience quotient goes a notch higher with the ability to order testing kits, get prescriptions, and access experts online from home, apart from just monitoring cycles. Managing health is really lower than ever.

What keeps people engaged with these apps long term, once the appeal to women is made?

Factors Driving Sustained Usage of Femtech Apps

Though downloads are easy to attain, not all users are actively using health apps. Building trust is a key to retaining users. What exactly is it that makes women users keep coming back to femtech platforms from week to week?

Accuracy of Tracking and Predictions

“Garbage in, garbage out” applies strongly to data-driven femtech apps. Erroneous period or fertility forecasts will frustrate women instead of helping them. Builders have to continually refine accuracy by sourcing more data points and improving algorithms.

Apps explicitly show prediction precision to retain user trust. Flo displays monthly accuracy scores for period tracking. Proven test results and doctor reviews also reinforce reliability for fertility testing apps.

User feedback is open on the best platforms, which then use it to amend cycle analysis anomalies. To sustain usage, you have to show progress in precision through transparency.

Relevance of Recommendations

True generic wellness advice doesn’t pull you towards engaging. Femtech apps have to give specific suggestions for each woman’s reproductive profile and health objectives.

Period trackers can push appropriately timed exercise regimens, nutrition plans, self-care prompts, etc., based on where users are in their cycle. Apps also educate women on high fertility days, early pregnancy precautions, menopause management, and more based on phase-specific needs.

Personalization requires synthesizing their tracked data, stated goals and contextual information like age, weight, health conditions, etc. Actionable and relevant recommendations specific to the user keep women checking back in.

Holistic Support Across Needs

Across life stages, women’s needs change from contraception to conception aid to menopause support. This aligns with this changing requirement, which encourages prolonged usage instead of single-purpose apps.

For instance, Tia started as a period/ovulation tracker but now also offers gynecological care, sexual health, pregnancy support, postpartum care and menopause services. Ovia’s suite of apps covers different stages like pregnancy, parenting and fertility.

Femtech apps positioned as long-term partners in women’s health win more loyalty compared to point solutions.

Access to Health Experts

While period and ovulation trackers are a great foundation for data, women usually need professional help to understand the implications.

Direct access to gynecologists, reproductive endocrinologists, pelvic floor therapists, mental health professionals, etc., through chat/call features builds credibility for femtech apps. It also fosters emotional reassurance when dealing with sensitive concerns.

Modern Fertility provides free 30-minute consults with fertility nurses to users. Others, like Minna Life and Genneve, enable in-app physician appointments. The convenience of expert medical advice, without appointments or clinic visits, keeps women returning.

Sense of Security and Privacy

In particular, privacy and data security are key to user comfort when dealing with intimate information such as cycles, sexual activity, contraception, pregnancy, etc.

Even the most useful apps risk being abandoned if they are hacked, data is leaked, or shared with concerns. Reassuring users proactively and explaining safety precautions in place results in more peace of mind.

Femtech apps include encryption methods, access controls and transparency on how data is used, and even include the ability to delete past entries irretrievably. Maintaining people’s sensitive medical history securely earns their ongoing reliance.

The Path Ahead for Femtech

Although women’s health technology has achieved widespread success, its use cases and market potential remain largely unexplored. However, some pertinent opportunities and challenges exist ahead.

Evolution from Tracking to Treatment

The end goal for femtech cannot be just monitoring and predicting reproductive health. True value addition will require helping women intervene in and improve their outcomes proactively.

This is the path forward: Modern Fertility’s entrance into personalized fertility treatment plans based on assessments. Apps will go beyond tracking to include prescription drugs, hormonal therapies delivered at home, at-home insemination tools, remote menopause counseling, and many more.

Preventive and corrective health will be the next frontier.

Overcoming Drop-Offs

The biggest threat to femtech’s future is abandonment after initial interest. Period-tracking app users stop engaging after three months at a rate of 72 percent. Principal drop-off drivers include privacy concerns, burden overhead, poor predictions, no actionability, and no support when vulnerable.

For the extended life, this will drive continued usage and therefore require ongoing value through better data integrations, personalized engagement features, and access to care. Alignment of early attrition risks and correcting them will be vital.

Operationalizing Robust Research

Femtech apps have access to very rich fertility health data at scale from millions of women around the world. The data capital contained in this has the potential to accelerate new reproductive research and insights faster than ever.

However, we must systematically operationalize the research potential, utilizing in-house experts and forming partnerships with university labs, hospitals, and biopharma companies. Here, data security and commercialization opportunities are both needed.

Responsible forging of robust medical research partnerships will open the doors to biomarkers of disease and early interventions, and much more.

Aligning with Evolving Market Needs

Women’s health needs are diverse and ever-evolving. The femtech market has expanded across subcategories like pregnancy tech, menopause tech and more. Continued fragmentation is imminent as startups spot newer micro opportunities.

But if they confuse users, this also runs the risk of confusing users. Consequently, apps must be specialized and simultaneously integrated across categories in accordance with what the user wants. Even while expanding the scope, the fundamental promise to women must be fulfilled.

Conclusion

Overall, femtech has been adopted because it addresses women’s need for personalized and proactive health insights. Retention is proving critical as convenience, community and access to care during vulnerable times.

However, data no longer needs to be overly passively tracked. We need a future, and enabling interventions by intelligent predictions, prescriptions, and expert guidance is necessary. Another bucket of potential will be unlocked by data security and partnerships.

As femtech builders expand their scope, they must remain in alignment with the core requirements of accuracy, convenience, and access to care for women. The promise of data-driven women’s health is only going to be delivered against these pillars.

The beginning of transforming medical outcomes by putting control directly in women’s hands. It is an exciting time for the consumers and creators of femtech solutions.