Trend: Innovative Tech Is Closing the Gender Gap in Medical Research
May 24, 2022
Artificial Intelligence (AI), apps, and wearables (even smart bras and pads) are increasingly collecting data for a wide range of women’s health conditions—whether vaginal health, fertility, endometriosis or menopause. The data is then powering more personalized interventions for women and this will impact not only healthcare but wellness .
Women Feel “Gaslighted” by Healthcare: Too many women’s health conditions are under-researched. Women were historically left out of crucial clinical trials up until the 1990s. Sex-specific differences were often unaccounted for, thereby defaulting to a male “norm.” This had long-lasting effects that are still felt today: it sometimes takes women four years longer than men to receive a diagnosis for the exact same disease. Many chronic conditions that disproportionately affect women lack adequate treatments—and studies show women are more likely to have their symptoms dismissed as “psychological” by doctors. There has been far too little research on female-specific health issues—whether menstruation or menopause.
Understandably, such gaps can leave women frustrated with traditional medicine. A recent article in the New York Times explains how women are now calling out “medical gaslighting” and sharing their maddening quests for an accurate diagnosis and treatment on sites like Instagram. While women are now more systematically included in studies, huge knowledge gaps in women’s health and wellness remain and things just aren’t moving fast enough to address their suffering.
Tech Steps In: This trend, written by journalist/author Rina Raphael for the Global Wellness Summit’s The Future of Wellness 2022 trend report, explores how femtech startups and tech giants are now expanding research data on women’s health through AI, smartphone apps, wearables, and virtual trials. From data-gathering trackers to “smart bras,” Silicon Valley is reimagining a host of existing technologies that allow for better representation of women in trials, quicker access to participants, and far more longitudinal data. They’re showing that there’s more than one way to collect health info…sometimes right from your back pocket.
The trend report is packed with examples of companies and research organizations using tech to close the women’s health research gap—from vaginal microbiome tests that aim to predict and treat everything from bacterial vaginosis to infertility to companies like Eastra Health using virtual trials to develop psychedelic medicines for women’s specific needs—whether to target premenstrual syndrome (PMS) or menopause.
It’s a development that will impact not only healthcare but wellness, because many of these femtech companies are using the new data to create personalized interventions for women that include not just medical solutions but also wellness approaches—from mindfulness to skincare prescriptions.
And the wellness world, which has long suffered from an “evidence gap” compared with medicine (traditional clinical trials can cost tens of millions of dollars), should embrace a future where wearables, apps and virtual trials could help them gather more data on the impact of wellness approaches and how to more precisely apply them to individuals.
Just a few examples of creative ways that companies are using tech to gather women’s health data:
Observational studies increasingly incorporate wearables, which offer continuous monitoring of participants. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-spinoff Bloomer Tech created “the world’s first electrocardiogram device that looks and feels like a bra.” Their smart bra is essentially a heart monitor using medical-grade fabric sensors and machine learning to gather heart health data. Better yet, it’s washable. Bloomer Tech plans to analyze users’ daily data and deliver them to researchers studying heart disease in women.
Menstruation data collection is particularly rich due to women’s widespread adoption of fertility and period apps (an estimated 100 million women worldwide use period-tracking apps). A Columbia University lab has partnered with period-tracking app Clue to establish the Citizen Endo Project, which aggregates female patients’ data to better understand endometriosis (a condition that affects nearly 10% of reproductive-age women and girls). They’ve launched an endometriosis-monitoring research app called Phendo for women to self-document symptoms and treatments. More than 15,000 users have contributed to this crowdsourcing data app. The team has also been analyzing clinical datasets from electronic health records and insurance claims. Combined, this totals two million endometriosis patients—making it the largest collection of endometriosis patient clinical data to date. The hope is that this will lead to more self-management solutions. Their founder states: “We’re using AI to learn what works specifically for you and what doesn’t, to the point where I can build a tool that would say, given how you feel right now, the best would be to go for a walk for half an hour rather than rest.”
The fertility trackers of today are the menopause trackers of tomorrow. It’s no surprise that menopause is grabbing Silicon Valley’s attention as 1.1 billion women (or 12% of the population) are expected to be experiencing menopause by 2025! San Francisco healthcare technology company Chorus released its flagship product, Caria, as a digital health platform for women going through menopause. The Caria app tracks dozens of symptoms, building upon a current foundation that incorporates existing research. Caria analyzes the combined data to identify personalized health solutions—everything from prescription drugs to lifestyle modifications, even mindfulness techniques.
Vaginal health is getting more attention and investment. Evvy’s at-home vaginal health test seeks to build new vaginal microbiome datasets that specifically incorporate holistic data like demographics, hormonal status, symptoms, etc. Evvy explores how female-specific biomarkers could predict, diagnose, and potentially treat conditions such as yeast infections, recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs), bacterial vaginosis (BV), and infertility. Millions of women deal with these issues.
Using testing and AI to create comprehensive, personalized healthcare + wellness solutions for women: FemTec Health has raised $38 million to create at-home diagnostic tests and tools focusing on the vaginal microbiome, among many other pursuits. The NY-based company uses AI and predictive analytics to gather user data for personalized solutions regarding the microbiome, fertility, menopause, skincare, and more. Their goal is to defragment the women’s health ecosystem with one centralized platform. To that end, it’s also launching a telehealth platform and direct-to-consumer brand called Awesome Woman. The company has access to 10 million users through its various acquisitions, including the popular beauty subscription box, Birchbox. Their Chief Science Officer on their big plans: “By connecting the health sciences part of Awesome Woman to the beauty part of Birchbox, we enable women to take charge of their health by providing synergistic health and beauty solutions such as skincare, contraception and other prescriptions, wellness products, at-home diagnostics, and mental health care.”
Flagging Potential Issues: While Silicon Valley’s motto is “move fast and break things,” traditional medical sectors can caution on the quality of evidence sourced from some of these technologies. For instance, crowdsourced apps offer anecdotal evidence that, while impressive in volume, does not necessarily account for complete accuracy. At-home testing kits can be vulnerable to contamination or incorrect usage. Representation is another tricky issue. Already, clinical trials do not always reflect subpopulations of women spanning age, ethnicity, or specific groups like the pregnant or lactating. Tech reliance poses another obstacle in ensuring the population of the trial is reflective of the treatment population. Not every group has access to smartphones or wearables.
But the need to move faster and further with long-ignored women’s health research is critical. And as Kathryn Schubert, CEO and president of the Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR), puts it: “There are so many opportunities now to really connect the dots in women’s health…when you think about the opportunities that exist both for self-reported data but also identifying where there might be gaps or areas of need, the potential is pretty limitless.”
This Trendium is based on “Innovative Tech Closing the Gender Gap in Medical Research trends from the 2022 Global Wellness Trends Report.
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