Exploring the Design Space of Technological Interventions for Menopause: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Menopause is a phase in a woman’s lifecycle, which is considered to have occurred when a woman does not have a menstrual period for 12 consecutive months. Despite being perceived just as a biological phenomenon, a woman experiences several psychosocial symptoms along the way as she transitions into menopause, which begin well before the cessation of menstruation and sometimes continue to exist even after the onset of menopause, making it a 2-to-7-year journey. Ongoing research on women’s health in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research community has led to an increasing number of works focusing on the intervention of technology in women’s health, including a rising interest in designing technological interventions for menopause. With approximately 6000 women reaching menopause daily in the US, there is a need to understand the design space of technological interventions for menopause by surveying prior studies, to eventually contribute towards designing technologies for menopausal women. This paper presents a systematic review of prior studies on technological interventions for menopause. The aim of the review is to (1) Understand how prior studies have approached the design of technological interventions for menopause (2) Identify the technological features and goals of the interventions proposed by prior studies (3) Identify the symptoms (physiological/psychosocial) being addressed by the proposed interventions. A systematic review of 12 papers collected from the ACM Digital Library highlights the characteristics of prior studies on technological interventions for menopause, such as type of study, study design and interventions that are discussed in the study. Based on the findings, we discuss aspects that were comprehensively studied, potential design implications for interventions for menopause along with limitations of the current study and opportunities for future research on technological interventions for menopause.