In the past couple of years, the market dedicated to women is emerging considerably with investors and VC’s investing millions in technologies and products geared toward women’s health.
What is femtech?
The femtech is a term used in technology world for all female related technology. The femtech primarily addresses women’s health, including fertility solutions, period-tracking apps, pregnancy and nursing, reproductive heathcare and much more. In fact, Ida Tin, CEO of the period-tracking app Clue, coined the word ‘femtech’.
In this regard, SteadySense, a Styrian femtech start-up which offers smart wireless sensor solutions has raised €6 million in funding led by eQventure and FFG&aws recently. With this, eQventure now owns 49.6 percent of the startup.
After three years of research and development, SteadySense has launched its first product, which is called femSense and is supposed to be able to calculate the fertile days of women. Moreover, femSense is approved in the EU as a medical device.
How it works?
“Our patch is affixed under the arm and worn during the menstrual cycle for a period of five to seven days,” said founder and CEO Werner Koele. “The patch measures the body temperature continuously and stores the data until it is read via NFC by a smartphone. The femSense app processes the data using a self-learning algorithm and displays the fertile days in the app. This is the basal body temperature method 4.0.”
“During the day the temperature of the human body varies but remains more constant while sleeping,” said Dr Michael Schenk, who has accompanied the product development of femSense since the founding phase. “During ovulation, the body temperature rises by 0.2° C to 0.5° C. This is the so-called basal temperature jump. While conventional methods measure only the warm-up temperature, femSense measures and compare temperature curves over several days, reliably detecting ovulation.”
SteadySense provides the entire system: the sensor patches, mobile Apps as well as interfaces to a centralized database. This helps women completely to understand their body since it documents everything right from menstrual cycle, moods and much more with visualised statistics.
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech startup world.
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