Still from the Oura Ring ad posted on YouTube
By Renia Morfakidou, Junior Researcher
I got my first period when I was ten years old, and I didn’t know what a period meant. Now, I am twenty-five. I’ve had approximately 150 periods, all of them, without exception, very painful and very heavy. When it comes to finding a word to describe my stance towards self regulating my pain and discomfort, ‘desperate’ would be an appropriate choice. Naturally, I downloaded a menstrual cycle tracking app on my phone the day I was introduced to the concept back in 2019, bearing hopes of a more manageable menstrual experience. The first tracking app I used was the one that emerged at the top when I typed “period tracker” in the App Store: it was called ‘Period Calendar’. Since then, I’ve experimented with plenty of phone-based menstrual tracking applications, sometimes using multiple ones in parallel.
In the post that follows I attempt to examine how digital technologies, particularly FemTech, mediate the bodily, emotional, and political dimensions of menstruation. I explore how apps and wearable devices promise self-knowledge and control, but may simultaneously reproduce forms of surveillance, commodification, and optimization. Drawing on my own experience, research, and participatory methods, I critically reflect on the promises and challenges of this growing phenomenon.
Blood Magic: the FemTech innovation
Self-tracking FemTech primarily consists of smartphone applications (apps) and smart devices designed to monitor user data associated with menstrual cycles, fertility windows, sexual activity, ovulation, hormone levels, and overall health and wellness. This information can be gathered either through self-reporting or automatically transmitted from wearable sensory devices. Some of these emerging wearables are the Oura Ring (Alzueta et al., 2022) and Ava bracelet (Nulty et al., 2022) that can predict fertility via tracking changes in the sleep cycle, temperature and heart rate. Digital self-tracking devices work in conjunction with numerous applications that enable the collection, storage, analysis, visualization, and sharing of personal body data through social media. These devices promise to help women gain greater control over their reproductive health as well as enhance their experience of menstruation. Sounds magical!
“I take you, body, in sickness and in health, from this day forward, through good times, bad times, and all the in-between times I promise to trust you, care for you, and actually listen to you. I vow to continue learning from you, for as long as we shall live”. The video was removed from the official Oura Ring YouTube channel a few days after I took a screenshot from the platform. However, it can still be found online by searching for ‘Oura Ring Commit to Your Body’ in a web archive.
This is the script for a promotional video by the makers of the Oura Ring. Here, tracking is portrayed as a celebration of union with the body, a promise of self-love. The Oura Ring, priced between €399 and €549, comes with a mandatory monthly subscription of €5.99 , placing it in the category of “luxury surveillance”: “surveillance that users voluntarily pay for, whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are marketed and perceived as personal benefits”. The script borrows the language of wedding vows, “I take you, body…” to cast the act of self-tracking as a sacred, lifelong commitment. Self-surveillance is framed as a marital bond to the body, an act of devotion that is even romantic and must be celebrated.
However, when it comes to FemTech, users do not always have reasons to celebrate. Adopting a critical approach we might argue that this technology facilitates biometric surveillance. One example is Activision Blizzard, a video game company that encouraged its workers to use Ovia Health , a collection of family-planning apps, tracking services. The data gathered by the applications is subsequently shared with the company, enabling them to track the number of employees who are pregnant, attempting to conceive, or experiencing high-risk pregnancies. The company rewarded employees that agreed on using Ovia Health’s services with a daily stipend of 1 US dollar. Activision Blizzard is only one of the employers that incentivizes the use of FemTech applications and, subsequently, collects and manipulates the elicited data. The case was included in investigative reports by the Washington Post and the Guardian. Even though this initiative was framed within the context of corporate wellness and the data are anonymized, it has raised a lot of concern.
While companies evidently discriminate against pregnant employees (Kitroeff & Silver-Greenberg, 2018) and US states as well as European countries are banning abortion rights (AP, 2023, Filipovic, 2019) FemTech technology becomes a means for ‘menstrual surveillance’ (Hammond & Burdon, 2024). In contexts where abortion is prohibited by law, seemingly harmless digital data might transform into potential evidence for criminal prosecution. When in 2022 the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, hence the constitutional right to abortion, messages like the following were surging on social media platforms: ‘If you are using an online period tracker or tracking your cycles through your phone, get off it and delete your data. Now.’ (Elliott, 2022).
Another area of critique within FemTech relates to self-optimization and reproductive labor. FemTech applications largely focus on fertility. Flo Health has described itself as a ‘true fertility friend for you’. The same app includes ‘Pregnancy and post-pregnancy modes’ and suggests: ‘Track your baby’s development and learn the essentials of being a parent with special visuals and articles developed by medical experts’ (Hendl & Jansky, 2021). Another app called Period Calendar by Simple design used the following promotional message: ‘Think of it as your personal period diary. It will help you get in shape, lose weight, and stay healthy’ (Hendl & Jansky, 2021), emphasizing the presumed desire of the user to get thinner. In her essay ‘Self-tracking ‘FemTech’: Commodifying & Disciplining the fertile female body’ (2020) Sara Roetman argues that the productive role of self-tracking FemTech needs to be understood within the framework of reproductive labor. Self-tracking and generating data can be perceived as a form of digital labor ‘focused on management and reproduction of the normative fertile, hormonal, and sexual female body’. Indeed, in addition to their feminine design, many tracking apps generate ‘self-enhancing’ advice when the user logs symptoms such as acne, pain, and low sex drive. In a way, they enforce the construction of the heterosexually attractive, sexually available and fertile body. The body becomes a customizable object upon which we should work to constantly improve and, even, optimize. The form of self-love advertised in the Oura Ring promotional narrative may ultimately become distorted, shifting from a practice of self-care into an algorithm-driven self enhancement modality, a drift towards conformity to normative ideals of health, femininity, and productivity.
Connected by blood: #PeriodTok
Technologies that mediate the experiences of menstruating bodies are not limited to wearable devices and tracking applications. Content-sharing applications, such as TikTok, also mediate the carnal experience of menstruation by facilitating the distribution of related information.
Sometimes I do feel like my TikTok algorithm really knows me. Like an ‘oracle,’ my ‘FYP’ provides me with content that feels meant for me: a video of someone sharing their experience of dysmenorrhea (hilariously), another proudly stating that they’re free bleeding in their ex-partner’s underwear, and another recommending taking x painkiller instead of y to alleviate menstrual pain. There is no scientific evidence backing up any of this information, though I still listen carefully and save this content. This part of the platform even has a name, it’s called #PeriodTok, a stream of content that feels hyper-personal, community-driven, and radically different from the sleek, data-centered logic of FemTech apps. Here too, health is being mediated and data is shared, through digital content, likes and comments, but all this feels drastically different to FemTech. If Oura promises magical self-love through metrics, #PeriodTok offers something more chaotic, communal, and emotional: the feeling of being seen, of being linked to others through the shared experience of bleeding. #PeriodTok sparked my interest in how other users interact with it and whether it ultimately affects their menstruating experiences.
At the PlayFair event hosted by ETHOS lab I attempted to explore how a complex algorithmic platform like TikTok acts as a ‘vessel’ for information on menstruation and female health. The main feature was a physical version of the For You Page, where the algorithm delivers content from creators and users about experiencing and managing menstrual cycles. The viewer/user gets to decide how they engage with this information. The physical vessel I chose was a vase, the content was transcriptions of #periodtok content written in post-its. The ‘users’/participants got to randomly pick content or provide their own by writing on a post-it and putting it back in the vase.
The vase was still lacking algorithmically driven personalized content for each participant, since the posts I included were targeted to me and had emerged on my For You Page. However, the participants still got the chance to experience unpromptedly coming across period-related information, statements, and jokes. While holding this physical piece of data, they decided how to handle it by generating data themselves, for example, by commenting on it, saving it by putting the piece of paper in their pockets, or scrolling away from it by quickly putting it back into the vase, signaling to the algorithm that they wanted something else instead. This setup attempted to rematerialize the For You Page in a way that retained some of its core characteristics (personalization, randomness, affective content) while also opening up new space for reflection and discussion on the content shared and the feelings and thoughts it evoked.
My goal was not to analyze the accuracy of the information, but to trace how menstrual knowledge circulates, how it is received, and what kinds of belonging or resistance it enables. The setup asked: What happens when menstrual experience is no longer optimized, tracked, or monetized, but simply shared?
When I went through the new content, I mainly discovered two things: (1) online platforms have the power to facilitate community building and a sense of belonging in relation to health, and (2) menstruality is closely tied to both menopausal and perimenopausal experiences, a dimension I had not yet considered.
My attempt at re-imagining #PeriodTok
Is self-governance a form of self-care?
The possibilities that femtech offers creates contradictions. While I was going through the ‘Cyberfeminist Index’ resources I stumbled across a video advertisement of a possible student-made IoT for menstruating women called ‘Periodshare’ and posted on vimeo (!). Created almost 10 years ago, “Periodshare” used technology to facilitate sharing your period with your network via a wearable, wireless menstruation cup connected to a mobile application. ‘The application automatically tracks your period, and informs your boyfriend, boss, and friends about your period. It can even live-tweet your menstruation data!’. This reminded me that, once upon a time, when even stating that you’re menstruating was a taboo, sharing your menstrual data was the whole point.
In the context of 2010s digital culture, where data sharing was rapidly expanding, ‘Periodshare’ pushed boundaries by playing with the taboo surrounding menstruation. But revisiting this speculative design now, in the era of mainstream FemTech products, it risks being misunderstood as earnest or naïve. While the idea of sharing cycle data might have felt empowering in the 2010s, today it prompts more critical questions (why would my boss need to know whether I am menstruating or not?) A decade later, the semiotics of datafication have shifted. When female health is datafied or tech-mediated, the underlying assumptions may lean less toward care and more toward labor, productivity, and control.
I would like to end this blogpost with a reminder. In ‘Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed’ M. Billuart (2023) states ‘When I’m at my worst, I’d gladly give up my privacy, all of it, just to give science and technology a chance to fix this, even if they’re grasping at straws, anything to target the root cause of my issues’. At the end of the day the key may lie in reimagining these technologies, in taking what you need and leaving what you don’t, making an effort to distinguish the boundary between care and self-enhancement, in realising that self-surveillance does not equal self love.
References
Alzueta, E., de Zambotti, M., Javitz, H., Dulai, T., Albinni, B., Simon, K. C., Sattari, N., Zhang, J., Shuster, A., Mednick, S. C., & Baker, F. C. (2022). Tracking Sleep, Temperature, Heart Rate, and Daily Symptoms Across the Menstrual Cycle with the Oura Ring in Healthy Women. International Journal of Women’s Health, 14, 491–503. https://doi.org/10.2147/IJWH.S341917
AP. (2023, June 28). Malta to allow abortion but only when woman’s life is at risk. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/28/malta-to-allow-abortion-but-only-when-womans-life-is-at-risk
Elliott, V. (2022). Period and Fertility Apps Can Be Weaponized in a Post-Roe World. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/fertility-data-weaponized/#:~:text=7%3A00%20AM-
Filipovic, J. (2019, April 11). Death sentence for abortion? The hypocrisy of US pro-lifers is plain to see | Jill Filipovic. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/11/death-sentence-abortion-hypocrisy-pro-life
Hammond, E., & Burdon, M. (2024). Intimate harms and menstrual cycle tracking apps. Computer Law & Security Review, 55, 106038. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2024.106038
Hendl, T., & Jansky, B. (2021). Tales of self-empowerment through digital health technologies: a closer look at “Femtech.” Review of Social Economy, 80(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764.2021.2018027
Kitroeff, N., & Silver-Greenberg, J. (2018, June 15). Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/15/business/pregnancy-discrimination.html
Nulty, A. K., Chen, E., & Thompson, A. L. (2022). The Ava bracelet for collection of fertility and pregnancy data in free-living conditions: An exploratory validity and acceptability study. DIGITAL HEALTH, 8, 205520762210844. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221084461
Roetman, S. (2020). Self-tracking “FemTech”: Commodifying & Disciplining the fertile female body. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11320