Femtech Apps, Quantified Reproduction, and Biopolitics

The contemporary moment is marked by the rapid adoption and use of digital devices and technologies by individuals for tracking personal health, fitness, and lifestyle. Referred to by various names such as quantified self (QS), personal analytics, personal informatics, lifelogging, and self-tracking, these practices are increasingly reliant on devices, services, and platforms that use machine learning algorithms and data to manage various aspects of the body and, in the process, mediate and configure understandings of health and wellness. Wearable devices and mobile phone apps remain the two most widely used technologies that allow users to measure and monitor their bodily activities by translating information into quantifiable digital data. This information can be used for private learning, knowledge about the self, keeping records, or sharing with others (with tracker community, family/ friends, healthcare providers, and so on). While people in the West embraced this culture of measuring bodily attributes quite early on, the rapid adoption of smartphones, availability of cheap internet services, and increased presence of the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare have made quantification of health through self-tracking technologies now accessible to a large segment of the Indian population (Dash, 2020). In this chapter, we examine the rising adoption of mobile phone apps by Indian women to manage their reproductive health with a critical focus on menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, and menopause. App-based reproductive health management continues to be the largest segment of the femtech industry – software, diagnostics, products, and services that use digital technology to support women's health (Folkendt, 2019) – even though women's health and possible solutions are a much broader category.