AI's Role in Improving Femtech for African Women

Originally published in The Yuan on December 6, 2022. Republished here by the author. Read the archived original.

Femtech has the potential to radically improve women's lives everywhere and has already begun doing so. With artificial intelligence (AI) improving healthcare outcomes and personalized medicine, femtech stands to greatly benefit from this new technology.

Femtech and AI joining forces will positively impact women's health and promote the need for women to be more adequately represented in datasets.

What is femtech?

Femtech is a term coined in 2016 for the niche healthtech market that uses technology to support women's health. These technologies can be in the form of software, diagnostics, products, and services that serve women's biological needs. Such needs include fertility, pregnancy, oncology, and others. One must also consider the different customer segments that these apply to, such as direct consumers, hospitals, fertility clinics, surgical centers, and diagnostic centers.

Is femtech needed?

The femtech industry accounted for USD40.2 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD75.1 billion by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 13.3 percent. The potential for return is huge, but do women's health matters really need to be tackled separately?

Femtech provides needed visibility and representation, while serving as a metric for measuring progress. Femtech also promotes the embrace of gender diversity, as well as improvements in healthcare delivery through virtual clinics and other measures enabling women to access healthcare more conveniently.

Femtech provides a means of improving clinical diagnostics, addressing unmet medical needs, and addressing stigmatized topics such as menstrual health, sexual health, and menopause.

Femtech also provides a means of addressing underrepresented subpopulations everywhere, such as black women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning populations, and women in low- and middle-income countries.

Femtech also covers women's health topics beyond reproduction and considers other aspects, including female-specific conditions and general health conditions that affect women differently or disproportionately. Female conditions outside of oncology account for less than 2 percent of the current healthcare pipeline, even though half the world's population comprises women.

Source: McKinsey, "Defining women's health, beyond reproduction."

Femtech's relevance to African women

In Africa, the femtech sector is still in its infancy, though it already shows a lot of promise. Femtech plays a very distinctive role in breaking biases, stigmas, and stereotypes around women's health, and raises awareness of important taboo topics like fertility and contraception.

Mobile applications have also played an important role in expanding femtech's reach. The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) surveyed female mobile ownership and internet use in several African countries. The results show that the top-ranked African countries were Algeria and Kenya, with 86 percent of women owning mobile phones, followed by Nigeria and South Africa, where the ownership rate is about 83 percent of women. In terms of mobile internet users, South Africa leads the way with the most women with internet access, followed by Algeria. The gap in mobile phone and internet use between men and women is still high but has been narrowing, and femtech should be able to further reinforce this trend, while taking advantage of this steadily growing reach.

Femtech continues to play an important role in educating African women on important topics, easing their access to preventative measures, fertility treatments, cancer diagnoses, and providing them with a safe space to discuss issues that often go unaddressed.

The importance of data and AI in femtech for African women

In 2021, research showed that 29 percent of femtech companies using AI are in the reproductive health subsector, while a further 24 percent are using it in the healthcare sector. Other sectors include femtech for beauty, pregnancy and nursing, diagnostics, and personal care and wellbeing.

The impact that data and AI will have on African women is as follows:

• AI will drive the improvement of data quality for use by femtech companies. This will result in a push for the representation of typically underrepresented groups.
• Given all the data from electronic health records, fitness apps, home genome tests, and others, the world still has yet to fully understand the plethora of data available. AI will thus continue to be an invaluable tool to help people understand these data and how they can act on the resulting insights.
• The democratization of AI has played an important role in driving accessibility, as many individuals, institutions and companies have been building AI-driven solutions, especially around oncology in Africa.
• Facilitating data interoperability and ease of access which may potentially influence open healthcare data and best practices to make this as safe as possible.
• Influence discourse and actions regarding data security, privacy, and the misuse of femtech data, and involve more African women in these discussions.
• Encourage transparency in the femtech industry, which will eventually build trust.
• Involving AI in femtech studies can also highlight the effects of racial ethnicity on drug metabolism, such as the effects of oral contraceptives, which may result in an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes in women. Again, this raises the need for representation in medical data.

African femtech companies using AI

• DilenyTech: An Egyptian healthtech startup that uses AI and medical imaging solutions. Its focus includes medical imaging analysis applications and breast cancer risk assessment. The firm's breast cancer risk assessment tool assists healthcare professionals in estimating women's risk of developing invasive breast cancer with the help of data science. This tool uses personal medical and reproductive history data to estimate breast cancer risk.
• Nextwear Technology: Its Smart Bra provides a non-invasive and painless method for cancer detection using machine learning (ML), Internet of Things and ultrasound technology, and is designed to help women check their breast status, detect the earliest stages of breast cancer, and help with breast self-examination.
• Grace Health: It provides AI-based period and ovulation predictions to support women on their journey to conceive or avoid conception. It also provides personalized educational content and expert-approved information to help women understand their bodies.
• Chil AI Lab: Uses AI and ML to provide specialized, affordable, medically proven chronic disease prevention and management services for Ugandan women. Its Keti mobile app enables women to consult with oncology experts, collect their samples, send them to labs, and receive their diagnoses and medical advice.
• Nabta Health: This company is building a decentralized, patient-centric healthcare platform for women in emerging markets. It combines digital and traditional healthcare methods and provides personalized healthcare to women on health, fertility, pregnancy, and menopause. Its app uses advanced ML algorithms to provide detailed and actionable insights.

Conclusion

Femtech has already proven that it is far more than just a buzzword. It plays an important and increasingly critical role in highlighting and solving health issues specific to women. With the help of AI, African women can now build AI-driven femtech solutions, which improve research, offer personalized user experiences, contribute to existing datasets, and participate in representation and data governance discussions.