Redesigning Care: FemTech, Inclusion, and the Future of Women’s Health Informatics
Introduction
Women's health has long been situated at the margins of both medical research and technological innovation. Despite the transformative potential of digital health tools, from electronic medical records to wearable devices and AI-assisted platforms, technological advancement in this space has often failed to account for the specific needs and experiences of women. Areas such as menstrual tracking, fertility, maternal care, and hormone-related mental health continue to be underrepresented or oversimplified in mainstream informatics discourse. At the intersection of health and computing, women's health has frequently been shaped by androcentric data models, social stigma, and systemic underfunding.
As the femtech industry grows in response to these gaps, it brings with it both promise and pitfalls. Many applications rely on oversimplified models, such as the mythologized 28-day menstrual cycle, and rarely incorporate the hormonal, physiological, and contextual variability of real users. This disconnect is not only a technical limitation but a reflection of deeper structural inequities embedded in our health systems. Technologies that claim to empower users often place the burden of interpretation entirely on individuals, without adequate clinical validation or integration into broader care ecosystems.
This thesis conducts a comprehensive literature review at the nexus of women's health and health informatics, with a particular emphasis on menstrual health as a diagnostic lens. By synthesizing peer-reviewed research, the project aims to surface the limitations of current digital health tools and advocate for a more inclusive, intersectional, and justice-centered approach to their design. In doing so, it interrogates the very definitions of health encoded into our technologies and asks: Whose bodies are being represented, and whose are being left out?
Abstract
Women's health remains one of the most underrepresented sectors in health informatics, with menstrual and reproductive care often sidelined in both research and technological innovation. This thesis explores how digital health tools—especially those under the emerging "femtech" umbrella—have failed to adequately reflect the complexity, variability, and lived experiences of women's health. Through a systematic literature review of over 1,500 scholarly sources, this work identifies current advances, persisting limitations, and key equity gaps in the design and deployment of women's health technologies. Findings show that while AI-powered diagnostics and personal informatics tools are on the rise, they often adopt reductive, normative assumptions that marginalize users with diverse cycles, conditions, or cultural needs. Moreover, low- and middle-income countries remain particularly underserved, exacerbating global health disparities. Grounded in reproductive justice and feminist HCI principles, this thesis calls for a shift from one-size-fits-most design toward inclusive, culturally competent, and justice-oriented digital health solutions.