Description

BabyTech (digital tools targeted at infants/toddlers) and FemTech (digital solutions for helping women with their health issues) are the latest trends in the healthcare industry. Digital health tools are finding applications in all areas of parenting—fertility, pregnancy, birthing, nursing, baby health, and safety. Women form nearly half the population and are the key decision makers at home. Public health concerns such as rising pre-term births and maternal mortality rates are strong factors that are encouraging consumers, healthcare providers and other stakeholders to use digital health solutions to better manage the entire birth continuum, from conception, to birth, and during the first years of infant care.
Many factors are driving increased focus from key healthcare stakeholders paving the way for more innovative and targeted digital health solutions. Regulatory bodies and the investment community both realize the potential and applications of digital health tools in this space and have been willing to give it the focus it truly deserves. However, lack of awareness of these tools and their advantages among women and healthcare providers, lack of clear reimbursement policies, accuracy and data security/privacy are factors that need to be addressed by companies in this area.

The maternal and infant care space continues to evolve along with major technology and health trends; this is creating a dynamic and exciting area for both vendors and users of these offerings. Moving forward, companies will look at increasingly integrating AI capabilities to yield optimal utility from data in a progressive way as well as leveraging Virtual Assistants as part of user-platform experiences, paving way for non-healthcare companies such as Amazon, Google and others to become key participants in this market.

More companies will create products to form a connected home ecosystem—the Smart Nursery; these products are interoperable devices that can be managed from the user’s smartphone. Frost & Sullivan also expects to see more companies investing in clinical studies,which aim to validate the accuracy of digital health applications in this area as part of further validation, and needed data to support potential claims or other business model aspirations.

This report identifies the movers and shakers (companies-2-action) in the maternal and infant care market for digital health, namely, innovative and visionary companies that are creating the market and shaping its trends and growth opportunities moving forward.