FemTech, including apps for fertility, menstruation, and menopause, increasingly shapes how users manage intimate aspects of their health. Yet these apps are often built on opaque commercial models, raising ethical concerns about consent, privacy, and misuse of sensitive health data. While prior work has documented these risks, less is known about how users perceive and negotiate commercial data practices in FemTech apps. We conducted an online survey with 187 participants, combining factorial vignettes with provotypes— interface prototypes designed to provoke reflection— to examine user boundaries and discomforts around FemTech data collection and commercial use. Participants drew sharp distinctions across data types, resisting peripheral data collection and pervasive tracking. Commercial practices were often judged conditionally: tolerated only when functionally relevant. Notably, our provotypes, even under exaggerated transparency, elicited more forgiving responses to commercial practices compared to brief text descriptions in the vignettes. We discuss implications for designing transparent, accountable, and user-aligned FemTech.

FemTech is an emerging industry offering products, software, and services to support women’s health and well-being. Within FemTech, mobile health applications (mHealth apps) are popular for managing menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, and menopause. Yet, these apps expose users to deceptive and misleading practices, which can be characterized as Dark Patterns in user experience (or dark UX). Dark UX in commercial FemTech mHealth apps is underexplored, leaving a critical gap in understanding how deceptive patterns manifest in intimate health contexts, the harms they cause, and how to address them. We crowd-source and thematically analyze user accounts of dark UX through user reviews from sixteen systematically selected FemTech mHealth apps. User-reported accounts of dark UX in FemTech mHealth apps reveal several problematic design patterns, which emphasize risks for minors and the need for more transparent design of FemTech mHealth apps. Based on our results, we outline recommendations for enhancing ethical UX design and furthering regulatory action in FemTech.

Assessing speech disorders in early childhood is challenging, and Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) play a key role in addressing such a challenge. However, tools that support speech assessment are often not child-friendly, and SLPs struggle to keep young patients engaged. To compensate, we introduce ArticuMotion, a child-friendly app that supports the assessment of speech disorders while engaging children in gamified experiences. We use participatory design to co-create ArticuMotion with SLPs and test the resulting product in a user study with nine preschool children. ArticuMotion has promise as a gamified assessment for motor speech disorders and shows a potential avenue for designing clinical tools that are useful while being child-friendly.

Commercial pregnancy apps are becoming popular in mobile health and integral to individuals' health management ecosystems. For that, they can complement medical advice and be conveniently used for ubiquitous tracking of pregnancy. Besides their functional and medical purpose, they may elicit subjective, personal, and intimate experiences that are equally relevant to users. Yet, these qualitative aspects of experiencing pregnancy apps remain under-researched. An inquiry into those qualitative aspects may help advance the design of pregnancy apps for improved user embodiment, engagement, and experience. Here, we qualitatively inquire about experiences with six popular pregnancy apps through 4,000+ online reviews. Our findings reveal that pregnancy apps are more than mere trackers and can impact pregnancy experiences, either positively or negatively, based on their design features. Further, reviews pointed to a neglect of family, friends, and relatives in the apps' design, which users found often problematic. To counter these shortcomings, we outline avenues for improving the design of pregnancy apps beyond usability and medical outcomes and call for enhancing their user experience through more sensitive, user-centered, and inclusive design.

Traditionally, game designers have driven the development process of psychotherapeutic games with psychotherapists playing a consultant role. In contrast, our study explores psychotherapists independently designing digitally gamified psychotherapy. Our workshop participants consisted of six psychotherapists who created gamified digital therapies with the design prompt of anxiety disorder. We analyze the resulting six prototypes from a game design and psychotherapy perspective. We present insights into strategies for digitally gamifying therapy and identify challenges and opportunities for the future of gamified psychotherapy, grounded in the experiences of psychotherapists designing such therapies. This study also reflects on the use of user-friendly development tools for independently curating gamified digital therapies, especially by non-technical users such as psychotherapists.