The Body on Record: Living with Health Tech
- Health apps have improved access to personal health information.
- Digital ecosystems are redefining what ‘normal’ looks like.
- The future of care will blend monitoring with self awareness.
We have started tracking everything about our health, which means we are more aware of our health than ever before. Steps are counted, sleep is scored, water intake is logged and our menstrual cycles are mapped. What was once private, unpredictable, even ignored, now appears rendered into graphs and predictions.
These technologies promise greater awareness and control, but when the bodies’ rhythms are reduced to numbers, does our awareness about ourselves deepen or does our dependence on tech quietly grow even more?
Heightened Awareness and Empowerment
Let’s take the example of menstrual tracking apps. For many women, menstrual tracking apps have become tools for interpreting body’s patterns. According to a research conducted by Francesco Rampazzo, these apps have been downloaded more than 200 million times globally across a hundred platforms. This scale places them within the rapidly expanding femtech and mobile health markets. By collecting user-entered data on cycle timing, basal body temperature and other physiological indicators, the algorithms estimate ovulation and fertile windows using calendar-based or symptothermal methods.
The researchers noted these apps frequently frame self-tracking as a form of empowerment, offering accessible reproductive insight through personal data. For women navigating conditions such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), perimenopause or fertility planning, can turn the vague sense of irregularity into a documented account for more precise medical conversations. These apps prompt users to situate their experiences within a measurable cycle, with technology functioning as an interpretive interface between sensation and structured data.
Dependence and Body Alienation
Alongside empowerment, something more subtle can take root: dependence.
When an app remembers for you, memory becomes outsourced. Research suggests period tracking apps do more than log information, they shape how users interpret their cycles. A 2022 survey of women’s experiences of using period tracker applications spoke to 330 users and found that over half of the respondents reported their period starting earlier than predicted and more than 70% reported it arriving later than forecasted. When this occurred, users described feelings ranging from frustration and confusion to anxiety, particularly concerns about unintended pregnancy.
This showed that if a prediction fails, for example if a period arrives late or the symptoms diverge from the projected patterns, this discrepancy can feel like bodily error rather than algorithmic limitation. Users may begin to cross-check bodies’ sensations against projected timelines, shifting interpretive authority from self-awareness to digital confirmation.
From Body to Project
Health tracking does not operate in isolation. It exists within a wider culture of metrics which includes sleep scores and recovery ratings leading to daily life becoming increasingly quantified. For many women, menstrual tracking becomes one layer within this broader system of self-monitoring.
As data accumulates, patterns become benchmarks. Cycles are not only observed but used to plan productivity, workouts and routines. What begins as insight can gradually shift toward optimisation.
This is not to dismiss the benefits. Health technologies have given visibility to experiences long overlooked. But as the research by Pippa Grenfell shows, when biological variation sits beside metrics designed for improvement, it can be subtly reframed as something to regulate.
When everything is measurable, the body edges closer to becoming a project.
Trusting the Body in a Digital Age
What began as a means of understanding the bodily processes better has now become part of a wider system of measurement. The transformation has been subtle, but significant: women are not just tracking their bodies, they are learning to see them through data.
The question then shifts from whether these tools should be used to how they are used. We cannot outsource awareness. Data can inform, but it should not override lived experience. As we continue to adopt these technologies, we must remain attentive to the difference between listening to our bodies and interpreting them only through a screen.
https://balsilliepapers.ca/bsia-paper/beyond-the-app-store-reproductive-governance-and-the-limits-of-digital-autonomy/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7894554/
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/11/11/pcos
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9047811/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20552076241298315
Author
