The Two Barriers to Adoption in Emerging Health Innovation
Why Wearable Neurostimulation For Menstrual Wellness Needed Meaning Before Momentum
Over the past 35 years, I’ve worked across regulated health, wellness, and complex technology — launching products where trust, risk, and behavior change determine whether something moves or stalls.
One of the clearest and most recent examples surfaced during the launch of OhmBody, a wearable wellness device designed to support menstrual comfort. As the CMO leading that effort, I deeply understood that we weren’t solving a single adoption challenge. We were solving two, simultaneously.
Challenge One: The Market Didn’t Yet See the Problem
In emerging categories, the first barrier is often invisible.
With OhmBody, we were introducing wearable neurostimulation into menstrual wellness. The science was credible. The mechanism had been studied and proven. But culturally, many women had normalized their menstrual challenges. Discomfort was something to manage quietly — with Advil, a heating pad, and a long-standing “push through it” mentality.
The market had not yet organized around a broader frame that women should support their period and that menstruation was a whole body experience — not just a uterus issue.
Before You Scale,
Adjust the Lens.
Before adoption could move, several beliefs had to stabilize:
This is a legitimate experience worth addressing.
It’s not a trivial or isolated issue.
It’s reasonable to seek active support.
There may be a credible new way to approach it.
Until that shift occurred, no amount of downstream marketing would have produced durable traction.
Challenge Two: The Mechanism Required Interpretation.
At the same time, we were introducing a modality unfamiliar to most consumers: wearable neurostimulation.
Even engaged audiences asked:
What exactly is neurostimulation?
Is it safe?
Is this medical or wellness?
How does stimulating the ear relate to menstrual comfort?
The science was not the constraint. Understanding it was. And shaping understanding in a regulated wellness environment is not a casual messaging exercise.
“The real work was converting the clinical mechanism into language the market could understand, trust, and act on—without diluting rigor or overstating claims.”
The wellness tightrope walk was real.
If you work in regulated marketing, you already understand the constraints. For others, this is an important distinction in messaging and positioning. A product positioned as general wellness, claims cannot state or imply that it:
Diagnoses a disease or condition
Treats a disease or condition
Cures a disease or condition
Prevents a disease or condition
Claims to affect the structure or function of the body in a medical way
Cross that line and you are no longer operating in wellness positioning. You place the product in medical device territory under FDA regulation—with all the obligations that come with it.
Having launched products on both sides of that boundary, I can honestly say this: developing credible wellness language around clinically studied mechanisms requires exceptional rigor. It’s not for the faint of heart. Much of what is known internally cannot be stated directly—which can be frustrating for teams who have invested deeply in the science. It can also be confusing for customers, who may sense that the language is carefully constructed and wonder why it seems to speak around the problem rather than directly to it.
So precision becomes strategic and language must be crafted like load-bearing architecture—every word carrying weight, nothing ornamental, and no structural room for error. The goal is not to obscure. It is to enlighten and generate trust while remaining credible, compliant, and clear within defined boundaries.
This is where many teams stumble. The science may be sound. But in regulated innovation, language defines the boundary of what can move.
From Mechanism to Meaning to Market
OhmBody launched within six months of conception, which was an amazing wild ride. Within a year, it received CES recognition and national attention. The science had been established long before that. What changed was the frame.
Once the problem was stabilized and the mechanism properly positioned, adoption had somewhere to land.
If you’re curious, explore OhmBody. I’m proud of the product, the brand, and work done to support women’s health. And, it’s a thoughtful example of what can happen when clinical credibility is paired with disciplined category framing.
The Pattern Behind Emerging Categories
In frontier health and regulated innovation, clinical validation opens the door. Understanding determines whether people walk through it.
When a company must simultaneously:
Help the market recognize the problem
Make sense of a novel mechanism
…the upstream work becomes decisive.
That layer — between mechanism, meaning, and market readiness — is where real scale begins.
If This Feels Familiar
If your product is scientifically sound but commercially heavy, the constraint may not be execution. It may be that the market has not yet caught up to what you’ve built. Upstream clarity changes that.