The tech industry is taking notice of a new audience: older women. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world's largest consumer electronics event held in January, companies unveiled innovative products and services targeting women's health needs beyond the traditional focus on fertility and pregnancy, with a particular emphasis on menopause and aging.
This shift comes as the women's health technology (known as femtech) market is projected to reach $125 billion by 2032, despite historically receiving just 2 percent of health venture funding, according to market reports.
As Seema Kumar, CEO of Cure said during a BioFuture event in New York in October 2024, “Until recently, women's health was always connected to the 'bikini areas' – the breast, the ovaries…We're now realizing there's something far beyond that traditional definition."
Driving the attention is a broader need for specific healthcare research into situations and conditions that just weren’t common a century ago, said Kristen Dahlgren, CEO and Founder, Cancer Vaccine Coalition, on a women’s health panel at CES 2025.
“In the past 100 years, this is the first time women have outlived their ovaries and gone through menopause,” said Dahlgren. “And so it really is this new phenomenon that we're experiencing and having to deal with, and we need so much more research and so many more treatments and so much more understanding.”
Kamili Wilson, Senior Vice President, AARP, described several innovative technologies she saw at CES this year related to aging women's health, including Ember Labs' thermo-regulating wristband that helps manage hot flashes and chills, Starling's home-based urinalysis system for detecting UTIs, and sleep monitoring technologies from Wesper and other companies that address the sleep disturbances affecting up to 60 percent of women during perimenopause and menopause.
"I'm really excited about these companies that are here, that are part of the age tech collaborative," she said during a panel. "There's all kinds of opportunities in terms of technological innovations, whether it's the wearable technologies, the AI or the learning mechanisms that we have access to."
Hormone Meter, Perimenopause Tracker
Companies working on health tech, digital health and consumer electronics are recognizing the specific medical needs for older women and came to CES 2025 with new solutions and products for this audience. For instance, Eli Health launched the Hormometer, a consumer health device that allows women to monitor their hormone levels at home. The device uses saliva samples and a smartphone camera to measure cortisol and progesterone levels in real-time, and the company plans to expand to other hormones in the future. The system was named a CES “Best of Innovation in Digital Health” award.
Peri, recognized as a 2025 CES Innovation Awards honoree, introduced a wearable device designed to detect and track perimenopause symptoms. Worn on the torso, Peri monitors physiological changes to provide data on symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and anxiety.
The company has also published a report on perimenopause, noting the condition affects 440 million women globally, yet only 9 percent feel informed about the transition. Symptoms like hot flashes, anxiety, and sleep disturbances impact 75 percent of women, leading to workforce challenges — 30 percent reduce work hours, and 43 percent are more likely to leave their jobs within five years if experiencing multiple disruptive symptoms.
The Peri report also showed racial disparities further compound the issue, as black women experience menopause 8.5 months earlier and suffer symptoms 3.5 years longer than white women.
Despite the disparities, only 4 percent of federal funding goes to understanding women's health across the board, said Sheena D. Franklin, Founder and CEO, K’ept Health, on a CES 2025 panel on advancing women’s health. As a result, many healthcare tools and products aren’t designed for women’s bodies.
“The number one killer of women is cardiovascular disease, so when we go into have all these tests and we're putting things on our bodies, they're actually not fit for our bodies,” Franklin said. “So, all the data that's being gathered in the office may be inaccurate. That's shocking to me.”
‘Superwomen’ Report
The increased focus on women’s health tech at CES 2025 aligns with findings from Havas’ “Superwomen” report, released during the event. The report highlights systemic inequities in healthcare, noting that women make 80 percent of healthcare decisions in the US, yet only 25 percent hold healthcare leadership positions in North America, and in 2023, only 32.4 percent were clinical trial participants. These disparities have often led to a healthcare system that overlooks the complexity of women’s health needs, from menstruation to menopause.
Despite living longer than men, women spend an average of nine years in poor health, with conditions like osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s disproportionately affecting them, according to a 2025 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS).
As Cure’s own Women’s Health Benchmark report pointed it, it wasn’t until 1993 were women included in clinical trials, and only in 2014 did NIH require inclusion of both male and female animals in funded preclinical research. To counter the underfunding of research in these areas, the NAS report calls for a new NIH Institute for Women’s Health with a $4 billion budget to address the gaps, as well as additional resources to study conditions like menopause and pelvic floor disorders.