Wearable health tech for women is emerging as a multi-billion dollar industry. In the latest MB Spotlight, we look at some of the most exciting new tech companies making inroads into the old dominance of Apple and Fitbit.
In the UK, our National Health Service (NHS) is the envy of the world, but a creaking system that requires huge funding is struggling to keep pace. We’ll steer clear of being embroiled in political arguments for and against the varied global health systems, but the NHS has become a victim of its own success, providing prevention, cure and everything in between for an ever-increasing population whose health, it is fair to say, has worsened in the last few generations.
However, the battle against sedentary lifestyles and poor diets seems to be facing a fresh and welcome fight in the digitisation of health tracking and our subsequent understanding and education of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle.
The Evolution of Wearable Health Tech
FitbitCatch-all wearable health devices are already threatening to become dated as the pace of development in health tech accelerates. A generation ago, you may have been labelled a ‘fit freak’ merely for wearing what now looks like a relatively clunky bracelet-style Fitbit around your wrist and tracking your daily step count.
Now, that’s the very least we expect from wearable health tech that will tell us just about anything, from whether we slept well and long enough last night to helping us understand fertility cycles or even foetal risk in pregnant women.
And it’s this development in health tracking for women and some of the more crucial health concerns they might encounter that offer not just the individual reason for optimism but, as an industry, could be the long-term answer to taking much-needed pressure off entire health systems like the NHS.
Latest UK estimates suggest that up to a fifth of all adults now have some kind of wearable health tracker, with a third of those being found in watches, such as Apple watches and their accompanying health-tracking apps. But there is a new breed of wearable that’s digging far deeper into specific health issues that are reshaping the industry and becoming big business.
Leading Innovators in Women’s Health Wearables
Whoop is a health tracking band which has become one of the most prominent challengers in the space in recent years. It enjoys a wide demographic appeal because of the breadth of health factors it’s able to track and also claims to be able to support women to better understand changes in their bodies during the menstrual cycle and how that can then affect and offer adaptations to training regimes. It also features support and guides for pregnant women, tracking changes in heart rate and other physiological signs that then create advice on hydration as well as required rest and sleep.
Whoop’s subscription model, its positioning as an elite fitness and sportsperson’s app and its minimalist, screenless wristband tech have made it an aspirational tool at the top end of health tracking and have helped it achieve estimated revenues around $750m.
Now on their fourth iteration, with an ever-increasingly attractive range of metal and ceramic designs, Oura has become a front-runner in a new wave of wearable health tech and health monitoring devices.
The ring-shaped device is worn on the finger and measures, among other things, skin temperature as well as heart rate. Importantly though, Oura became one of the first to champion women-specific health monitoring and will track period cycles, fertility windows and pregnancy insights.
Having been founded in 2013, Oura’s story isn’t the overnight success everyone may assume, taking them three years to get beyond prototype and no more than a handful of eager early adopters, eventually landing its first serious funding round in 2016. Even then, it was another four years before they would break through sales of more than 100,000.
From 2020, everything changed, and a series of big funding injections catapulted the ability to superpower sales, Oura reportedly selling more than 2.5 million rings by the middle of 2024, reporting an almost 60% bias towards female users.
Many would argue they’ve now built a viable pathway for many others to successfully plough a furrow in the development of wearable health tech specifically for women.
With revenues reported of $500m for its last financial year to 2024 and a rumoured funding round of a staggering $875m being ploughed in just weeks ago, markets are predicting Oura to have a value now in excess of $10bn.
Developing over a similar timeframe was the fertility-tracking device Ava. Founded in 2014, it too took its time to gain traction, but by 2018, it was staking claim to more than 10,000 successful pregnancies by its users, offering an impressive 89% accuracy rate on its detection of most fertile days.
The wristwatch-style device, which was founded in Switzerland, crucially secured US FDA-approved status in 2021 and a year later was boasting some 70,000 reported pregnancies from users. That attracted the advances of FemTech Health in 2022, who snapped Ava up. Details of the price tag aren’t clear, but by that stage, Ava had attracted some $42m across a number of funding rounds.
Elegant designs for pendants, necklaces, clips and bracelets in wood, metal and hypoallergenic materials are predominantly screen-free and are designed as fashion accessories first, but health metrics include step and fitness tracking, sleep patterns, menstrual cycles and breathing and reproductive health metrics.
Details of Bellabeat’s popularity with its fashion-first health tracking range aren’t clear, but some commentators suggest most recent annual revenues of $35m and a company nearing some one million sales in its lifetime.
The Future of Women’s Wearable Health Tech
With the pace of change and development in healthtech, accelerated by smart use of AI learning machines which will better predict future health concerns, the market is only likely to get bigger with more and more people accepting the personal benefits digitised and wearable health trackers can offer.