Issue 40: Ovulation tracking earrings | Tesco goes 'menopause friendly' | $1.7m for DeepLook
+ lots more in your weekly roundup of women's health innovation and FemTech news
Hello and welcome to issue #40 of FutureFemHealth, here to bring you your weekly news about women’s health innovation and FemTech (w/c 12 February 2024).
🌟 Coming up today we’ve got:
👂🏼 Ovulation tracking…through your earrings?
📌 Retailer Tesco goes ‘menopause-friendly’
✅ $1.7m for DeepLook Medical’s breast cancer detection
❤️ Australian Government funding for Baymatob wearable pregnancy monitor
Got news to share from the world of FemTech and women’s health innovation? Let me know at anna@futurefemhealth.com
📌Quick reminder…CensHERship survey
There’s still time to add your voice to our censHERship survey before it closes next Tuesday 20 February. We want to hear your experiences of censorship of women’s health content online. Ads rejected? Content taken down? Reach limited? Yes, it’s all still happening and we need it to stop. Please add your voice here.
👂🏼 Could your earrings track your ovulation?
After smart watches, and smart rings, could the future of wearables be smart earrings?
Perhaps yes - researchers at the University of Washington have designed and tested a prototype for a smart wearable earring.
And the results have been very encouraging.
The idea was inspired when doctoral student Qiuyue (Shirley) Xue started hearing frustrations about the bulkiness of a smartwatch. It got her and a team of researchers thinking.
“I also like to wear earrings, so we started thinking about what unique things we can get from the earlobe.”
The group created a smart 'Thermal Earring' - as light as a paperclip, with 28 days of battery life, it can continuously monitor temperatures.
In a small study they found the earring actually outperformed the accuracy of smart watches too:
“We found that sensing the skin temperature on the lobe, instead of a hand or wrist, was much more accurate. It also gave us the option to have part of the sensor dangle to separate ambient room temperature from skin temperature.”
And of course temperature monitoring has great applications for women’s health.
“The Thermal Earring’s reliable temperature readings have the potential to enable applications such as ovulation tracking, surpassing the capabilities of current smart watches."
While this is extremely early days and there no commercial product just yet, with an estimated 76% of women (in the US) having pierced ears, this could be a device with significant interest.
(Read the full story: FutureFemHealth)
📦 Supermarket giant Tesco introduces ‘menopause aisle’
What do you think of this? Retailer Tesco is trialling a dedicated section in some stores for ‘menopause-friendly’ products. It’s divided opinion - journalist Kate Muir has called it ‘patronising, money-grabbing codswallop’ but Tesco says the move will give customers experiencing menopause the confidence to shop for products they need and want.
Influencing the initiative is GenM, the ‘unashamedly commercial’ organisation which created the menopause-friendly ‘m-tick’ - a symbol added to products suitable for menopause to make them more identifiable. GenM wants to make ‘menopause the new vegan.’
Whatever the outcome of this experiment, it’s an example of where we’re seeing retailers willing to test how they can better appeal to changing awareness of women’s health and demand among consumers.
For a while now there’s been an evolution in how retailers serve period care. The iron-clad dominance of Tampax, Bodyform and Lil-Lets is starting to very slowly loosen grip. Retailers are more and more open to fresh challenger brands. Under the Sainsbury’s ‘Future Brands programme’ for example, female-founded brands introduced include Dame and Yoni period pads and tampons. Sustainable and chemical-free they are the product of choice for a new generation of shoppers.
But retail needs to keep up. The popularity and ease of new, dedicated online marketplaces is definitely having an influence. Case in point, the fast growth of FemTech favourite Unfabled - which is able to create a more personalised, relevant experience for their customers than traditional bricks and mortar.
💰 Funding, deals and investment news
📌 US: $1.7m for DeepLook Medical breast cancer detection. Approximately 45% of women have dense breast tissue which means an increased risk of breast cancer - and nearly half of cancers in dense breasts are missed on initial mammograms. Enter DeepLook Medical, which has developed ‘DL Precise’ the first AI tech platform specifically designed to visualise suspicious masses in dense breasts. Connecticut Innovations, Tidal River, plus others including various Angel investors participated in this round. (Source: DeepLook Medical)
📌 Australia: Baymatob wearable pregnancy monitor secures investment from Australian Government. Globally, a patient dies from postpartum haemorrhage every seven minutes. Yet this is preventable in many cases. Baymatob’s ‘Oli PPH’ is the only product that identifies individuals at higher risk of developing postpartum haemorrhage well before giving birth, providing essential warning time. It’s now received a slice of $3.25m funding from Australia’s Medical Research Future Fund. (Source: Smart Company)
📌 France: The Essence app lands €500k to tackle menstrual health disparities in the workplace. More than two-thirds of women have bad work experiences due to periods. Paris-based Essence helps employees optimise their schedule according to their hormonal cycle to improve productivity. Funding came from majority female investors including Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, Davidovs VC and angels. (Source: EU-startups)
🌟 More news from this week
📌 UK: Pregnancy app continues rollout through NHS. The ‘Badger Notes’ app is beginning to replace paper notes and means patients get real-time access to their maternity care records. Hull is the latest area to go digital. Midwife Liz Davis said: “"In the past the hospital and the person who was expecting a baby each had separate paper records.” The app is already in place at a number of NHS Trusts around the UK - and follows a call by NHS England last July for innovations in a range of areas including maternity that would be ready to spread across the NHS. (Source: BBC)
📌 GLOBAL: FemTech predictions for 2024. What to expect in FemTech this year including continuous hormone monitoring, pelvic health awareness and the normalising of sexual wellness. (Source: Guidea)
📌 GLOBAL: 30 new FemTech start-ups selected for UX support. UX design firm Guidea has invested more than $1m in FemTech through sponsorship thanks to its Femovate program. Now after 130 applications from six continents, it has announced the next 30 early-stage businesses that will benefit. (Source: Guidea)
🩸 Research and women’s health news
📌 UK: Compensate victims of pelvic mesh scandal, says new report. Thousands of women faced life-changing consequences after pelvic mesh implants - designed to treat incontinence and prolapse - caused physical injury instead ‘like razors inside the body’. Now a report from England’s patient safety commissioner has called for urgent financial help for those who suffered. (Source: BBC)
✅ Jobs
📌 Product Marketing Manager, Mira Fertility (remote / US)
📌 Senior Content Editor, Flo Health (London/ UK)
📌 Chief of Staff, Female Founders Fund (NY / Hybrid / US)
That’s all for this week, see you next time,
Anna