18/10/2024
Today (18 October 2024) marks World Menopause Day: an opportunity to raise awareness around an area of women’s health that affects 450 million women worldwide, and the technology being developed to address it.
Menopause technology is an important and growing subset of the broader FemTech industry, which provides technological solutions to female-specific health conditions. Although the UK has the second largest share of FemTech in the world, innovators in the menopause space are still struggling to gain financial backing, with menopause tech often viewed by investors as “too niche to fund”. To make things even more challenging, the censorship of language around menopause—due to a combination of advertising restrictions and societal taboos—affects how products can be marketed or even discussed online.
Women of Wearables (WoW) is a global community organisation that supports women in the wearable technology and FemTech industries. They have released a list of 50 trailblazing leaders in the menopause space, which spotlights innovators, researchers and entrepreneurs who have made their mark on the field in recent years.
The list aims to increase visibility and encourage collaboration between innovators and investors, and includes:
- Elizabeth Gazda, CEO of Embr Labs, the company behind the Embr Wave: a wearable device that helps manage menopausal hot flushes by providing personalised thermal sensations.
- Colette Courtion, CEO and founder of Joylux, a FemTech company focusing on vaginal wellness and pelvic floor health during menopause. Their flagship product, the vSculpt (also marketed as vFit), is a home-use device that uses a combination of red light therapy, gentle heat, and sonic vibration to alleviate menopause symptoms such as pelvic floor weakness and vaginal dryness.
- Gloria Kolb, CEO of Elidah. Elidah developed Elitone, a device that helps to strengthen pelvic floor muscles to address menopause-related incontinence.
- Alicia Clausel of Oura Health. Oura Health developed the Oura Ring, a smart wearable device that uses sensors to monitor biometric data and provide users with personalised insights into their sleep and general health during the menopause through a companion app.
This World Menopause Day, we invite you to listen back to our FemTech in Focus episode of Talk IP with R&G, where we explore some of the pioneering tech outlined above, and more. We also discuss innovation in the contraceptive and endometriosis spaces, and the ways in which companies safeguard their intellectual property and fund further innovation.
Reddie & Grose has a wide breadth of cross-disciplinary experience in drafting and prosecuting patent applications relating to medical devices and digital healthcare related inventions. If you have products in these spaces or particularly the FemTech space, and are looking to obtain patent protection, or would like to discuss this or any of the content of this blog, please reach out to us.
This content is for general information only. Its content is not a statement of the law on any subject and does not constitute advice. Please contact Reddie & Grose LLP for advice before taking any action in reliance on it.
