New tech is getting to the crux of perimenopause

PERIMENOPAUSE, the time before a woman experiences menopause, is only just coming into the national conversation.

Typically, perimenopause affects women in their mid to late 40s, although it can be earlier. It generally lasts around four years, but for some women, symptoms may only last for a couple of months, and for some women they can last as long as 10 years.

It can be a confusing and challenging time.

The headline symptoms of perimenopause - hot flushes, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, night sweats - can greatly affect a woman’s daily life. And there are dozens of other symptoms, both physical and mental, that impact perimenopausal women.

There’s never a good time to experience perimenopause symptoms. But for most women in their mid to late 40s life is busy. In this context, many perimenopause symptoms can hide in plain sight, attributed to stress and ageing.

Making it easier to understand perimenopause, identifyHer is a wearable sensor and app that tracks, logs and analyses symptoms in a non-invasive way, over time. The wearable sits just under your breast and passively collects data from five sensors. Passively is the key word here.

Heidi Davis, co-founder of identifyHer, correctly points out how difficult it is to self-report perimenopause symptoms.

“It’s hard to self-report your symptoms. It can be difficult to identify certain symptoms, and it’s not always easy to remember when you experienced them.

“Night sweats, for example, don’t always wake you up, and even if they do, you might not remember them the next morning,” explains Heidi.

This means that self-reporting is bad for accuracy. It doesn’t paint the full picture. In fact, perimenopause itself is notoriously difficult to diagnose.

One of the main characteristics of perimenopause is the massive fluctuation in hormone levels; this is essentially what causes all the problems. Amidst this hormonal upheaval, blood tests are next to useless. Simply put, hormone levels can be up one minute, and quite literally, down the next.

It is a tumultuous phase, so much is happening in a woman’s body at the time. And up until relatively recently, nobody was even trying to understand it.

IdentifyHer is the first company in the world to passively collect perimenopause symptoms data.

“We are collecting important women’s health information. All of this valuable data presents us with hard evidence. As we go forward, we can better profile women based on different factors and get a better understanding of perimenopause,” says Heidi.

For now, identifyHer is focused on four of the more common perimenopause symptoms - hot flushes, difficulty sleeping, anxiety and night sweats.

Heidi and her co-founder, Donal O’Gorman, built an algorithm that analyses the sensor data and generates reports that can give a woman a clearer picture of her symptoms; their severity, their frequency, their progression.

Using the identifyHer app, women can access all this information and view helpful analysis of their symptoms: ‘Your night sweats increased by 10% this month’ or ‘Your sleep quality decreased by 39% this month’.

This is such useful information. It can help women to better understand what’s happening to them.

Let’s take anxiety, for example. At face value it’s not always obvious that rising anxiety is as a result of perimenopause, but Heidi explains that perimenopausal anxiety has a specific pattern. Armed with this, and other symptom data, women can show their doctor and get a diagnosis.

A path towards diagnosis

A diagnosis can be a lifeline for some women as it means the beginning of treating the symptoms, whether that’s with HRT or something else.

A perimenopause diagnosis is not always easy to get; some doctors will want to wait to see if a woman is experiencing more symptoms before diagnosing perimenopause, and some others, unfortunately, may attribute certain symptoms to other issues.

Women using the identifyHer app can also add in extra information such as diet or lifestyle changes that may help them to shine a light on problematic foods, or indeed foods and lifestyle choices that are making a difference.

The ultimate goal is to put the power back in the hands of women, and help them gain some control over what can be an overwhelming time.

“At identifyHer, we are guided by what women want and what’s important to them,” says Heidi.

“Our product has been tested and informed by the data we’ve collected from 200 women all over Ireland.

“We’ve listened to them and will continue to listen to them as we add more symptoms.”

The coming year promises to be a busy one for the identifyHer team. The start-up, which is supported by the Cork-based Health Innovation Hub Ireland, kickstarted the year by exhibiting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, one of the most influential technology events in the world. And in the third quarter of 2024, after two years of development, Heidi and Donal will officially launch identifyHer in the US. Watch this space for the launch of identifyHer in Ireland later in 2024.