Millions of women are increasingly being encouraged to track their health digitally. Periods, hot flushes, sleep, mood, sexual activity, fertility, medication and other deeply personal experiences can now be entered into apps and analysed over months or years.
For women experiencing perimenopause and menopause, this could be enormously valuable. Symptoms can change over time, interact with one another and be difficult to communicate during a short medical appointment. Technology offers the possibility of creating a much richer longitudinal picture of what a woman is experiencing.
There is, however, another question that deserves considerably more attention. Once a woman has spent months or years creating that intimate digital history, who actually controls it?
Research from University College London and King’s College London suggests that this is not a theoretical concern. Researchers examining 20 popular female health apps available through the UK and US Google Play stores found significant inconsistencies between what some apps appeared to tell users and what their privacy policies actually allowed.
The opportunity in the next generation of FemTech may therefore be about more than collecting better data. It could be about designing a fundamentally better relationship between women and their data.
The Privacy Problem Is Real
The 2024 UCL and King’s College London research examined the privacy practices of 20 popular female mobile-health applications.
The findings were troubling.
Researchers found that 35 per cent of the apps claimed in their Google Play data-safety information that they did not share personal data with third parties, while their privacy policies described some level of third-party sharing.
Only one of the 20 apps explicitly addressed the particular sensitivity of menstrual information in relation to potential law-enforcement access and attempted to provide additional safeguards against that risk.
Researchers also identified problematic consent mechanisms, difficult data-deletion processes and instances where sexual and reproductive information could potentially be linked with other digital activity.
This does not mean every FemTech company is secretly selling women’s health information, nor does it mean every menopause application is unsafe.
It does demonstrate something more fundamental.
A woman can enter extraordinarily sensitive information into an application without necessarily having an equally clear understanding of where that information travels afterwards.
Menopause Creates an Especially Interesting Data Problem
Menopause is not a single event that can be captured with one measurement.
Perimenopause can unfold over years, and experiences vary significantly between women. Someone may track changes in sleep, hot flushes, menstrual patterns, concentration, physical activity and other symptoms over a long period.
That makes longitudinal information potentially useful.
A single appointment captures a moment. Technology can help capture the journey.
The problem is that creating that journey also creates an unusually intimate dataset.
The more useful the application becomes, the more information someone may give it.
That creates a difficult trade-off. Personalisation requires information, but every additional piece of information creates another question about storage, access, sharing, security and control.
The next generation of FemTech needs to solve both sides of that equation.
Could Blockchain Help?
Blockchain is often presented as a solution whenever ownership, identity or trust becomes difficult.
In healthcare, the argument deserves more careful examination.
One attractive idea is that rather than trusting every individual health application to become the permanent custodian of a woman’s information, the woman could control a digital identity through which she determines who is permitted to access different parts of her health history.
She might give her GP access to a longitudinal symptom record.
She could give a menopause specialist temporary access to hormone-test results and treatment history.
She might separately decide to contribute selected, appropriately protected information to a university research project.
The important difference would be that access becomes explicit, granular and visible.
Blockchain could potentially provide part of the trust infrastructure behind that system.
But there is an important catch.
Do Not Put a Woman’s Menopause History on a Blockchain
One of blockchain’s most celebrated characteristics is also one of its biggest problems for healthcare.
Blockchains are designed to make records extremely difficult to alter retrospectively.
Health information sometimes needs to be altered, corrected or deleted.
Under data-protection law, individuals also have important rights concerning their personal information, including rights relating to rectification and erasure.
The European Data Protection Board has therefore warned that storing personal information directly on a blockchain can create significant compliance problems.
That means the technically credible architecture looks different from the simplistic version often associated with Web3.
A woman’s menopause symptoms, clinical information and personal records would generally remain encrypted and stored securely off-chain.
The blockchain could instead record permissions, consent events, verification credentials and an auditable history of authorised access.
The difference is crucial.
The blockchain does not need to become the medical record.
It could become part of the system controlling the keys to the medical record.
Smart Contracts Could Make Consent More Dynamic
Most people encounter digital consent through a familiar experience.
A long privacy policy appears.
The user presses accept.
That interaction can grant permissions whose consequences are difficult to understand.
Healthcare deserves something considerably better.
Imagine instead being presented with specific choices explaining what information is requested, who wants it, why they need it and how long access should last.
A woman might allow her GP to access her complete symptom history while allowing a university researcher to access only an anonymised subset.
She could permit a particular research project to use sleep and hot-flush information without sharing her sexual-health information.
She could grant access for six months rather than indefinitely.
Smart-contract technologies could potentially help automate and record these permissions.
Research into blockchain-based healthcare consent increasingly explores precisely these kinds of dynamic, auditable consent mechanisms.
The difficult part is ensuring that withdrawing permission actually propagates through every system that previously received access.
That remains an active technical and governance challenge.
Imagine Being Able to See Who Accessed Your Health Data
One of the most interesting opportunities is not necessarily ownership in the legal sense.
It is visibility.
Imagine opening your menopause application and seeing a simple access history showing that your GP accessed your symptom record on Monday, your specialist reviewed your treatment history on Thursday, and an approved research project received an anonymised dataset the previous month.
If an organisation requested additional information, you could approve or reject that request.
This turns privacy from a document into an interface.
Instead of being told that your information is being handled responsibly, the system could provide evidence about how it is being used.
That could fundamentally change the relationship between FemTech companies and their users.
Research Participation Could Become More Transparent
Women’s health research has historically suffered from important evidence gaps, and better longitudinal data could potentially help researchers understand menopause experiences across much larger and more diverse populations.
The current digital model creates an uncomfortable question, however.
If millions of women collectively create an extraordinarily valuable dataset through their everyday health experiences, how should that value be governed?
A more transparent infrastructure could allow women to actively opt into particular research programmes.
Someone might receive an invitation explaining that a university is studying sleep disruption during perimenopause. The application could explain exactly which information researchers want, how it will be protected, how long it will be retained and what the study hopes to discover.
The woman could then decide whether to participate.
Blockchain technologies could potentially create an auditable record of that consent.
Compensation, where ethically and legally appropriate, could also be handled transparently.
However, turning health information into speculative crypto tokens would introduce unnecessary complexity and potentially create new ethical problems. The interesting innovation is not creating a marketplace where intimate medical information becomes a tradeable asset.
It is giving people meaningful agency over whether and how their information contributes to research.
The Technology Stack Could Be Bigger Than Blockchain
The strongest FemTech product might therefore combine several technologies rather than treating blockchain as the solution to everything.
| Technology | Potential Role |
|---|---|
| Encrypted personal data stores | Securely hold symptom histories, test results and treatment information. |
| Decentralised identity | Allow users to verify themselves without repeatedly surrendering unnecessary personal information. |
| Verifiable credentials | Allow trusted organisations such as clinicians or research institutions to prove who they are. |
| Blockchain or distributed ledgers | Maintain tamper-evident records of consent and authorised access where this provides genuine value. |
| Smart contracts | Help automate granular and time-limited data permissions. |
| AI | Identify patterns across longitudinal symptom information where clinically appropriate and properly validated. |
| Privacy-enhancing technologies | Allow useful analysis while reducing unnecessary exposure of identifiable information. |
| Interoperability standards | Allow information to move safely between FemTech products and healthcare systems. |
This is a considerably more interesting architecture than simply putting health records on a blockchain.
The objective should be to minimise where sensitive information travels while maximising the individual’s ability to control legitimate access to it.
There Is a Bigger Design Opportunity
The UCL research points towards a wider problem with digital privacy.
The dominant model places much of the burden on the user.
People are expected to read lengthy privacy policies, understand complicated data-sharing arrangements and make informed decisions before they can use a service.
That is particularly unrealistic in healthcare.
A woman experiencing insomnia, hot flushes or other difficult symptoms should not need to become a data-protection lawyer before recording how she feels.
Privacy therefore needs to become part of product design.
A well-designed application could make permissions understandable at the moment they matter. It could show clearly what information remains private, what has been shared and how access can be withdrawn.
That turns trust from a legal statement buried inside terms and conditions into a visible product feature.
Trust Could Actually Produce Better Data
There is also an interesting commercial consequence.
Companies sometimes behave as though collecting the maximum possible amount of information creates the maximum possible value.
That assumption may be wrong.
If users do not trust a platform, they may withhold information, provide incomplete information or stop using the service altogether.
A woman may be considerably more willing to record sensitive experiences if she understands exactly where that information will go and retains meaningful control over its use.
Better privacy could therefore produce better participation.
Better participation could produce better longitudinal datasets.
Better datasets could produce better research and potentially better products.
Privacy does not necessarily sit in opposition to innovation.
It could become part of the infrastructure that enables it.
The Bigger Picture
The menopause technology opportunity is often presented as a race to build better symptom trackers, wearables, diagnostic tools and personalised health applications.
There is another layer underneath all of them.
Trust.
As women’s health becomes increasingly digital, intimate experiences are becoming datasets. Those datasets can create enormous value for individuals, clinicians, researchers and companies, but only if the systems collecting them deserve the confidence being placed in them.
Blockchain may contribute to that future, particularly through identity, auditability and dynamic consent.
It is unlikely to solve the problem alone, and storing intimate health information permanently on-chain could make matters worse rather than better.
The bigger opportunity is therefore architectural.
What would FemTech look like if we designed it from the beginning around the principle that the woman should remain at the centre of decisions about her information?
That question creates opportunities for cybersecurity specialists, UX designers, healthcare researchers, cryptographers, privacy engineers, clinicians, data scientists and women’s-health specialists to work together.
The winning technology may ultimately be almost invisible to the woman using it.
She would simply know what information exists, understand why somebody wants it, decide whether they should have it and be able to change that decision.
That is a much more meaningful definition of digital ownership.
Women deserve technologies capable of understanding the complexity of their health without requiring them to surrender control of the data that makes that understanding possible. The next generation of FemTech could discover that trust is not simply an ethical requirement; it is part of the product.