Please join us at the 7th Scale-IT-Up Workshop 2026 – Advancing Digital Women’s Health Across the Life Course in Marbella, Spain, March 02-03, 2026.

This workshop takes place in conjunction with the 19th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies – BIOSTEC 2026.

SCOPE

Women’s health remains underrepresented in both clinical research and digital health innovation. This workshop aims to shape the future of Digital Women’s Health by exploring how digital technologies—ranging from mobile health apps, sensors, wearables to agentic AI —can address both female-specific conditions (such as endometriosis, PCOS, menopause, and maternal health) and conditions that affect women and individuals assigned female at birth differently or disproportionately (e.g., cardiovascular disease, migraine, mental health, etc.) across their life course.

At the intersection of technology, gender equity, and healthcare, we invite contributions that span disciplines including (but not limited to):

• Digital health & bioinformatics
• Feminist HCI and equity-by-design
• Data science & algorithmic fairness
• Public health & policy
• Industry perspectives on scaling solutions

Key Question: How to Scale Up Digital Women’s Health Successfully?

This event builds on the Scale-IT-up tradition of bringing together academics, innovators, policymakers, clinicians, and industry partners to discuss the opportunities and challenges of scaling equitable digital health solutions that advance women’s health and gender medicine.

We especially welcome work that:

… tackles data and evidence gaps in women’s and gendered health

• How can digital health technologies contribute to closing the gender data gap in under-researched conditions such as endometriosis, PCOS, or menopause in a scalable way?
• What methodological approaches enable scalable, more equitable, sex- and gender-disaggregated health data collection in real-world settings?
• How can real-world evidence from scalable digital health tools reshape the clinical understanding of conditions that affect women or AFAB individuals differently

… designs inclusive, intersectional, culturally sensitive, or equitable digital interventions

• How can digital interventions be co-designed (and maybe scaled) with diverse user groups to reflect cultural, linguistic, or socioeconomic diversity?
• What design principles help scale inclusion of marginalized populations, such as migrant women, older adults, or people with low health literacy?
• How can intersectional design scale up adherence, trust, and engagement in digital women’s health interventions?

… develops or evaluates scalable, real-world digital health technologies

• What are the critical success factors for scaling digital women’s health tools across diverse populations and healthcare systems?
• How can continuous monitoring (e.g., through wearables and sensors but also self-tracking) be effectively, engagingly, and ethically used in women’s health contexts?
• What lessons can we learn from real-world implementations of digital health solutions for female-specific or gender-sensitive conditions?

… explores business models, implementation strategies, or health system integration

• What business or reimbursement models are needed to scale gender-sensitive digital health tools to be sustainable and accessible?
• How can implementation science help bridge the gap between digital health innovation and routine women’s care?
• What barriers and enablers exist when scaling gender-responsive digital health into public or private healthcare systems?

Let’s advance the field—together.

1. Dr. Marcia Nißen, Centre for Digital Health Interventions, University of Zurich & School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen, and Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
2. Prof. Dr. Hannes Schlieter, Research Group Digital Health at the Faculty of Economics, TU Dresden, Germany
3. Prof. Dr. Tobias Kowatsch, Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, University of Zurich & School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen, and Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

1. Davinny Sou, PhD Candidate, ETH Zurich & School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen
2. Marinja Principe, PhD Student, University of Zurich
3. Laura Bitomsky, PhD Candidate, University of St.Gallen
4. Dr. Rasita Vinay, University of Zurich

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2021 – Online | Scaling-Up Healthcare with Conversational Agents
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Figueroa, C. A., Luo, T., Aguilera, A., & Lyles, C. R. (2021). The need for feminist intersectionality in digital health. The Lancet Digital Health, 3(8), e526-e533. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2589-7500(21)00118-7