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As HCI research turns to women's reproductive health as a topic of interest, an increasing number of female-oriented technologies (FemTech) are being marketed to consumers.This opens up a space for better management and understanding of intimate health but is not without risk.Reproductive health data collected by FemTech devices is highly sensitive and politicized.Breaches of privacy can cause or exacerbate discrimination and gender inequality, and negatively impact users' safety and well-being.It is therefore important that users are well informed about how their data is collected, handled, used and stored.This work contributes insights into whether and to what extent this is achieved by current FemTech.We conduct a structured content analysis of 18 in-effect privacy policies.Applying an empirically-grounded taxonomy, we identify challenges in policy wording, content and presentation.We conclude with recommendations for improving transparency and supporting users in providing informed consent and claiming data authority. CCS Concepts• Security and privacy → Privacy protections; Usability in security and privacy; Information accountability and usage control; • Social and professional topics → Women.

HCI research has been instrumental in enabling self-directed health tracking. Despite a plethora of devices and data, however, users’ views of their own health are often fragmented. This is a problem for women’s health, where physical and mental observations and symptoms are strongly intertwined. An integrated view throughout different life stages could help to better understand these connections, facilitate symptom alleviation through life-style changes, and support timely diagnosis: currently, women’s health issues often go under-researched and under-diagnosed. To capture the needs and worries of self-directed tracking, interpreting and sharing women’s health data, we held workshops with 28 women. Drawing upon feminist methods, we conducted a Reflexive Thematic Analysis to identify six central themes that ground opportunities and challenges for life-long, self-directed tracking of intimate data. These themes inform the design of tools for data collection, analysis and sharing that empower women to better understand their bodies and demand adequate health services.

Any active entity that shares space with people is interpreted as a social actor. Based on this notion, we explore how robots that integrate functional utility with a social role and character can integrate meaningfully into daily practice. Informed by interviews and observations, we designed a zoomorphic floor cleaning robot which playfully interacts with care home residents affected by dementia. A field study shows that playful interaction can facilitate the introduction of utilitarian robots in care homes, being nonthreatening and easy to make sense of. Residents previously reacted with distress to a Roomba robot, but were now amused by and played with our cartoonish cat robot or simply tolerated its presence. They showed awareness of the machine-nature of the robot, even while engaging in pretend-play. A playful approach to the design of functional robots can thus explicitly conceptualize such robots as social actors in their context of use.