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The rise of femtech: How brands can safeguard customer data
The global femtech industry is in great shape these days, with steady annual growth having it on course to be valued at $1.186 trillion by 2027.
Though this upward momentum is great news for industry business leaders, it’s important to remember that the rise of femtech comes with higher volumes of private customer data and a greater responsibility to protect it.
Studies show that some femtech apps have misused sensitive user data, so every femtech brand must adopt and maintain effective best practices for keeping customer data safe, staying legally compliant, and developing trust in their brand.
In this post, we’ll look at six of the most important strategies femtech brands can use to safeguard their customer data.
Understand Your Legal Obligations
As digital privacy has become a bigger and bigger topic in recent years, a regulatory landscape has emerged requiring all tech companies to adhere to strict regulations when it comes to storing and using customer data.
However, when you’re operating in the femtech space, these rules become far more stringent.
Healthcare is a strictly regulated environment due to the fact that businesses are handling highly sensitive data, and you’ll need to build a thorough understanding of your business’s obligations in this area to keep your customer data safe.
If, for example, your brand’s flagship product is an app for tracking menstrual health, the personal health data gathered on your users will fall under GDPR for EU customers, and HIPAA when you’re catering to users in the United States.
Becoming intimately familiar with all the key legislation that applies to your app and the rights of its users will give you a strong starting point for understanding the obligations your tech product needs to fulfil, and the tangible steps you can take to ensure you’re fully compliant.
Create and Implement a Data Governance Strategy
Data governance strategies establish internal rules and operating procedures that help to ensure your business’s data management aligns with legal requirements and industry standards, while also enhancing your brand’s data quality, cyber security, and operational efficiency.
Your brand’s data governance strategy should be clear and accessible to employees at all echelons of your business, especially those who come into contact with sensitive customer data.
This set of rules should include clear best practices on data storage, access, usage, and deletion.
While strong data governance is crucial for all kinds of tech companies, this is especially important for femtech businesses and other firms in the healthcare space, where seemingly minor mistakes can lead to customer harm and severe legal consequences.
By having firm guidelines for who can access sensitive data, best practices for data storage and organisation, and other important variables, you’ll be able to close off potential sources of leaks and streamline the way your business uses data for a higher-quality customer experience.
Practise Robust IT Asset Management
IT asset management is a set of practices that involves tracking all your business’s physical devices, data, and software.
With effective asset management practices in place, you’ll not only make it easier to organise your equipment and data assets but also help to prevent security vulnerabilities that could potentially put your customer data at risk.
Proper IT asset management is not only important when your data and equipment are in active use at your company but also when you retire pieces of hardware that could potentially be the source of customer data leaks.
Many IT asset management services specialise in securely recycling old equipment to guarantee the destruction of sensitive data.
By creating and upholding a system where you can track all devices used to manage sensitive customer data, you’ll be able to ensure that employees leaving the company or devices being retired won’t leave sensitive data vulnerable to leaks or attacks.
Ensure You’re Only Collecting Necessary Customer Data
When many femtech leaders wonder “how can you keep data secure?”, they may be coming from a standpoint where they’ve already collected far more data than their business really needs.
Data minimisation is a crucial concept you’ll need to embrace as a femtech brand, not only to make sure you’re keeping within data protection laws but also for the practical security measures that keep your customers safe.
If, for example, you provide an app to support women’s mental health, you might need to gather data points relating to your users’ general demographics and symptom tracking in order for the technology to function.
However, for the sake of data minimisation, you should make a point to avoid collecting unnecessary data like location tracking or personal information.
Enacting policies that ensure you’re only collecting customer data that’s absolutely necessary, you’ll both respect your customers’ right to privacy and reduce your business’s overall risk of a data breach and similar issues.
Carry Out Periodic Data Audits
Regularly scheduled data audits will give you an opportunity to review the customer data that you have stored, ensuring that this aligns with relevant privacy legislation, as well as your internal security policies and data governance strategies.
With a thorough audit of the data you’re holding, you’ll be able to flag any sensitive data that needs to be deleted, while also making decisions about moving data to more secure storage assets or updating your company’s security policies to reflect changing needs.
When you’re providing femtech tools where countless users can switch from being active to inactive or back every day, scheduling periodic data audits is essential for keeping your systems clean of outdated or expired data, and minimising the potential touchpoints for leaks, breaches, and cyberattacks.
Proactively Train Your Team
Any attempts to secure femtech customer data will only be as effective as the people managing these security measures, and human error can be a major source of security inadequacies for any tech company.
To minimise these kinds of risks to your customer data, it’s crucial to make time for regular employee training, including staff who don’t directly manage data.
Make sure that these training sessions are up-to-date with the latest legislation and general cybersecurity best practices, that they aim to help everyone understand why data privacy is important in the world of femtech, and the best ways to avoid falling victim to phishing, social engineering, and other potential cyber threats.
To reinforce the issues covered in your training sessions, you might want to follow this up with additional measures such as simulated phishing scam emails sent out periodically to your staff.
These kinds of tests and the data you collect from them can help gauge how effective your security training has been, and highlight any departments, teams, or individuals who might need additional education on cybersecurity.
Protecting Customers With Robust Practices
Though the rise of femtech has had innumerable benefits for women’s health, it’s important not to lose sight of the huge volumes of customer data that drive the industry, and the potential risk that this carries.
By researching your obligations as a company, and fulfilling this with robust policies, maintenance, and training programs, you’ll be able to keep providing a great service to your customers while keeping them and your brand safe.
We hope this guide has given you a great starting point for reviewing your company’s relationship with customer data and planning your next steps towards safer, more efficient IT operations.
Light exercise and less sitting may reduce pregnant women’s risk of serious blood pressure complications, according to a new study.
Researchers have proposed a daily activity and sleep guide that they say was linked to a nearly 30 per cent lower risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
The suggested pattern includes fewer than eight hours of sedentary time, at least seven hours of light physical activity, around 22 minutes of more intense activity and nearly nine hours of sleep.
The University of Iowa-led study examined the daily behaviours of 470 pregnant women across all stages of pregnancy.
Participants wore monitors that measured physical activity over 24-hour periods and recorded how long they spent asleep.
Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy include chronic high blood pressure, gestational hypertension and pre-eclampsia.
Gestational hypertension is high blood pressure that develops during pregnancy, while pre-eclampsia is a potentially serious condition involving high blood pressure and signs that organs may be affected.
Sedentary behaviour means being mostly inactive, such as sitting or lying down.
Light physical activity can include casual walking, moving around the home or standing.
Moderate to vigorous activity includes movement such as brisk walking, where breathing and heart rate increase.
Kara Whitaker, associate professor in the department of health, sport, and human physiology at Iowa and corresponding author of the study, said: “We are identifying the optimal composition of movement behaviours across the day associated with the lowest risk of developing HDP and the most improved health outcomes.
“This blueprint holds for each and every trimester of pregnancy.”
Study participants were enrolled at sites in Iowa City, Pittsburgh and Morgantown, West Virginia.
The women wore activity and sleep monitors for at least one week during each trimester of pregnancy.
Four in five participants were non-Hispanic white and nearly a quarter lived in rural areas.
The data showed a steep rise in risk among pregnant women who were sedentary for more than 10 hours a day.
Women who increased light physical activity to at least four hours a day reduced their risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy to 15 per cent from 30 per cent.
Whitaker said: “Just moving around more seems to have significant health benefits.
“And I think it also may be a more feasible target for women who are pregnant who are not exercising regularly.”
The researchers said they were surprised that longer durations of moderate to vigorous physical activity did not appear to provide additional benefit.
Sleep beyond a certain duration also did not appear to bring major further benefits.
Whitaker said: “Through this study, we are providing evidence that reducing sedentary behaviour and engaging in light physical activity are important, and maybe more important, when it comes to pregnancy and health.”
The findings may be relevant beyond pregnancy because clinical research has shown that women who develop hypertensive disorders of pregnancy are more than twice as likely to develop heart disease later in life.
Cardiovascular disease includes conditions affecting the heart and blood vessels, such as heart disease and stroke.
Whitaker said: “We know that cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of women, and if we can intervene in pregnancy and prevent women from developing a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy, we are putting them on a better trajectory, away from cardiovascular disease and toward more optimal cardiovascular health.”
The study was published online on June 10.
A second study, published online on May 27, looked more closely at the ratio and type of sedentary behaviour and light physical activity linked to a lower risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
Whitaker is a lead co-author on that study.
Co-authors in the June 10 study include Alex Crisp, Jaemyung Kim, Karina Smith, Donna Santillan, Mark Santillan and Bridget Zimmerman, from Iowa; Jacob Gallagher, from Iowa State University; Melissa Jones, from Oakland University in Michigan; Bethany Barone Gibbs, Katrina Wilhite, Alexis Thrower and Iqra Sheikh, from West Virginia University; and Sabera Rahman, Janet Catov, Christopher Kline and Maisa Feghali, from the University of Pittsburgh.
The National Institutes of Health, the University of Iowa Institute for Clinical and Translational Science, the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute funded the research.
We are excited to reveal the winners of the third annual Femtech World Awards.
The winners were announced at a virtual event this afternoon attended by shortlisted companies, along with sponsors and judges.
The event welcomed guests from the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.
Thank you to all 174 entries, as well as the sponsors for making the event possible.
See you in 2027!
Femtech World Awards 2026 Winners
Winner:
Shortlisted:
IVI RMA x Juno Genetics
Natural Cycles
Winner:
Highly commended:
U-Ploid
Shortlisted:
Hello Inside
Winner:
WISE HF, led by Prof. Mary Ryder
Highly commended:
Cardiac College for Women
Shortlisted:
Hyvelle Ferguson-Davis
CognitiveCare
Winner:
Highly commended:
Youterus
Shortlisted:
ŌURA
Winner:
Shortlisted:
LeanShield by ParrotPal Group
Perigen
Winner:
Shortlisted:
Body Moody
Looop
Winner:
Shortlisted:
Owning Your Menopause
Womeno
Winner:
Shortlisted:
The Blue Box
Celbrea
Winner:
Shortlisted:
HealCycle
Mor
Winner:
Shortlisted:
HRC Fertility
Mira
Pregnant women’s expectations about postpartum sleep may predict sleep quality after birth, outweighing prior sleep and psychiatric history, a study suggests.
The findings suggest attitudes and beliefs about sleep during pregnancy could be a modifiable risk factor for postpartum sleep concerns.
They also indicate that, among women expecting the poorest sleep, higher postpartum anxiety may further worsen sleep quality.
Sammy Dhaliwal, lead author is clinical health psychologist and research fellow in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dhaliwal said: “Most pregnant women in our sample anticipated poor postpartum sleep before it occurred, and it was striking that those expectations predicted worse sleep outcomes even after accounting for factors such as prior sleep disorders, psychiatric history, and number of previous births.
“This suggests that attitudes and beliefs about sleep during pregnancy may represent a modifiable target for early intervention before postpartum sleep problems emerge.”
Sleep disturbance affects an estimated 60 to 80 per cent of postpartum women and is linked to a higher risk of depression and anxiety.
Researchers said it is often regarded as an expected part of life after childbirth rather than a health issue that may be addressed earlier.
The study enrolled 432 pregnant women at about 24 weeks of gestation, meaning around 24 weeks into pregnancy.
Participants completed measures of their expectations about postpartum sleep, current sleep quality using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and mood using validated depression and anxiety scales.
Assessments were repeated at six, 12 and 24 weeks postpartum.
A subset of 49 women also wore wrist actigraphy devices at six to eight weeks postpartum.
Actigraphy uses a wearable device, similar to a watch, to estimate sleep and wake patterns based on movement.
The results showed that 70 per cent of pregnant women, or 301 of 432 participants, expected poor sleep in the postpartum period.
Researchers found that predicted sleep disruption during pregnancy was a significant predictor of postpartum sleep concerns.
Among first-time pregnant women without prior health concerns, those who expected greater sleep disturbance had significantly more disrupted sleep after birth, measured by both actigraphy and self-report.
Among women who expected the worst sleep quality, higher postpartum anxiety significantly worsened both measured sleep and self-reported sleep, independent of anxiety levels during pregnancy.
Dhaliwal said the findings point to two possible areas for intervention: addressing sleep-related beliefs during pregnancy and treating postpartum anxiety.
Dhaliwal said: “Postpartum sleep disruption is often treated only after problems develop, but our findings suggest there may be an opportunity to intervene earlier during pregnancy.
“Addressing sleep-related beliefs and postpartum anxiety during prenatal and postpartum care may help improve sleep and emotional well-being in new mothers.”
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