Building AI for the Women Digital Health Keeps Missing

Every startup begins with a spark. But sometimes that spark is less like a lightning bolt and more like a pattern you cannot stop noticing.

For me, that pattern was the gap between what women experience after birth and what digital health tools are actually built to support.

Postpartum recovery is often framed as a short, temporary stage. In reality, many women continue navigating fatigue, sleep disruption, mood changes, pain, hormonal shifts, identity changes, and fragmented care for months or even years after giving birth.

The Women’s Digital Health Industry Continues to Overlook

That gap becomes even wider for women managing chronic or neurological conditions. A woman with multiple sclerosis, migraines, autoimmune disease, ADHD, chronic pain, dysautonomia, diabetes, or a history of pregnancy complications may not experience postpartum recovery as a clean return to baseline.

Her symptoms may overlap. Her energy may fluctuate. Her sleep may affect pain. Her stress may affect digestion. Her hormones may affect cognition.

Yet many mainstream maternal health and wellness tools still assume a fairly narrow postpartum user: someone generally healthy, emotionally resourced, and primarily looking for baby tracking, fitness features, or generic self-care tips.

Seremom was created because that model leaves too many women out.

I wanted to build an AI-powered postpartum wellness platform that helps women up to five years postpartum better understand patterns in their bodies, routines, emotions, and recovery. The goal is not to replace clinical care. The goal is to make the space between appointments more informed, more personalized, and less isolating, especially for women who cannot afford continuous support or who do not see their lived experiences reflected in existing digital health products.

As a women’s health occupational scientist, clinician, and assistant professor, I have spent years studying the relationship between health and daily life.

In my work, I ask women how sleep, caregiving, work, pain, identity, cognition, routines, relationships, and environment all interact to affect daily functioning.

That lens became central to how I thought about Seremom.

A woman may not need another app telling her to “drink more water” or “take time for herself.” She may need help noticing that her worst fatigue days follow fragmented sleep, skipped meals, sensory overload, or stressful caregiving patterns.

Where AI Can Actually Be Helpful

This is where AI can be meaningful when designed responsibly.

AI should not simply generate more content. Women already have more content than they can process. The opportunity is to help translate lived data into useful reflection.

Questions like:

• What changed this week?

• What patterns are emerging?

• What might be worth discussing with a clinician?

• What small step could feel realistic today?

When AI is grounded in thoughtful design, it can support awareness, self-advocacy, and earlier recognition of concerning patterns.

For founders, especially those building in health tech, one lesson is clear: inclusion cannot be added at the end. It has to shape the product from the beginning.

That means asking who is missing from the default user story. It means designing for fatigue, brain fog, disability, caregiving demands, limited time, emotional overwhelm, health anxiety, and uneven access to care.

It also means avoiding the assumption that every user wants a perfect wellness routine. Some users are simply trying to get through the day with more clarity, dignity, and support.

Another lesson is that lived complexity should not be treated as a product problem to

simplify away. It should be treated as intelligence.

When women describe overlapping symptoms, shifting routines, and unclear triggers, they are not being “messy” users. They are showing us the real architecture of health.

A better digital health platform should honor that complexity without overwhelming the person using it.

Building for Complexity Instead of the “Default User”

Building Seremom has also taught me that mission-driven entrepreneurship requires a different kind of patience.

The easiest product to build is often the one that serves the most obvious market. The more meaningful product may require slowing down, listening longer, and refusing to flatten people into neat categories.

Women with chronic and neurological conditions should not be treated as edge cases. They should be treated as central design users because when we build for complexity, we often build better tools for everyone.

There is also an important community lesson here.

Startup ecosystems often celebrate speed, scale, and disruption. Those things matter. But in health tech, trust matters just as much.

A product that touches women’s health, postpartum recovery, disability, mental health, or chronic symptoms has to be thoughtful about language, privacy, expectations, and emotional safety.

Founders in this space need to be ambitious and humble at the same time. We can believe technology can improve access while still respecting the limits of technology.

The Future of Women’s Digital Health Needs to Feel More Human

My hope for Seremom is that it becomes one example of a broader shift in women’s digital health: away from one-size-fits-all wellness and toward tools that reflect the full reality of women’s lives.

That includes:

• The mother still recovering three years after birth

• The woman whose autoimmune symptoms worsened postpartum

• The woman with ADHD who needs support organizing health patterns

• The woman managing migraines, fatigue, trauma history, pain, or neurological symptoms who has been told too often that “everything is normal” when her body is telling her otherwise

The founder lesson I would offer is this: build for the person who is usually treated as “too complicated.” That is often where the most important innovation begins.

When we design for women who have been overlooked, we do more than create better products. We create a more honest definition of health, one that recognizes that recovery, wellness, and resilience are not linear.

They are lived through patterns, routines, symptoms, relationships, and small decisions made every day.

Seremom began with the belief that postpartum women deserve more than generic advice. They deserve tools that see them more fully.

For the next generation of health tech founders, that may be the real opportunity: not simply to make care more digital, but to make digital health more human.

About the author: Dr. Sabina Khan is the founder of Seremom, an AI-powered postpartum wellness platform designed to support women up to five years postpartum, with a focus on those managing chronic and neurological conditions. She is a women’s health occupational scientist, clinician, assistant professor, researcher, and health tech strategist whose work centers on inclusive digital health, maternal wellness, and equitable access to care.