We Need Cycle Tracking Without Bleeding, but Clue Doesn’t Do the Trick
One of the best period tracking apps, Clue , recently announced a feature that is set to be groundbreaking for people who don’t get their periods but still experience cyclical health changes. The app claims to be the only health app that tracks your cycle even when you’re not bleeding. This means that people who don’t get their periods due to surgery, hormones, gender transition, or life stages like postmenopause can also track their cycles.
The premise is sound and much needed. Even if you’re not bleeding, your cyclical changes in mood, energy, and physical symptoms don’t just disappear. These patterns are important for understanding your body, managing health conditions, and making informed decisions about your well-being. Clue deserves credit for recognizing this gap in reproductive health tracking.
But here’s where the hype wears off, and where there’s a fundamental flaw in the entire period-tracking industry: These apps are still glorified diaries. If you can start a new “cycle” whenever you want, then your tracking is essentially based on vibrations. That’s the problem with users manually identifying their own patterns, even when the technology to automatically detect cycles already exists.
How Menstrual Cycle Tracking Works (And How It Doesn’t) Today
Traditional menstrual-tracking apps work on a simple principle: You tell the app when your period starts, and it uses that data to predict future cycles and fertile windows. This works well enough for people who bleed regularly, but it completely excludes those who don’t bleed — a huge group of the population, including people using hormonal birth control, those who’ve had a hysterectomy, people on gender-affirming hormone therapy, and people who are postmenopausal.
Clue’s new feature tries to solve this problem by allowing users to manually start a new “cycle” whenever they want, based on how they’re feeling. But it’s not fundamentally different from existing period apps — it’s simply replacing “I’m bleeding” with “I think I’m starting a new cycle.” Users still need to self-diagnose their cycle patterns, rather than trust technology to detect them.
The problem is that if you have irregular periods, you often don’t know when your cycles start or end. That’s why you need to track them in the first place.
The technology already exists
What’s particularly frustrating is that the technology to detect cyclic patterns without manual data entry not only exists, it’s already built into devices that millions of people wear every day.
Beth Squareski, who tests wearables that offer women’s health features, puts it best: “I have irregular periods, but I don’t know if I have a cycle — some people on my birth control method do, and some don’t. So I get excited every time I hear that a device can use body temperature to predict ovulation, or that it looks for patterns in your body metrics. But I haven’t found one that even tries to track your cycle without you manually marking the days you have your period.”
The science is simple : Your body temperature typically rises about half a degree in the second half of your cycle compared to the first half. The day your temperature rises is when you ovulate, and the day it drops is when you typically get your period.
Oura , Whoop , most Garmin watches ,the Apple Watch , and virtually every premium smartwatch already track your body temperature for these precise changes. And many of these wearables will pick dates when they think you’re ovulating, but only if and after you manually note the dates you notice bleeding. As Beth points out, that seems like an awfully limited use of this data, given the effort these platforms put into analyzing and spotting patterns in all the other data they collect. Whoop will tell you whether you sleep better on nights when you’re more hydrated . Oura will tell you when your body temperature and other metrics seem to indicate you’re getting sick . Somehow, though, none of them seem to apply this data to independently spot cyclical patterns.
“Given all the effort that Oura (and Whoop, and other wearables) put into finding patterns in your personal biometric data,” Beth explains, “it seems like a huge oversight that they’re not directing their algorithms to ask, ‘ Does this user have a cyclical monthly pattern in their temperature data? ’”
Plus, temperature is just the beginning. Today’s wearables track heart rate variability, sleep patterns, activity levels, and stress levels—all metrics that can fluctuate cyclically in people with hormonal cycles, whether or not they’re menstruating.
Who does this really affect?
As someone who is completely in Clue’s target audience for this feature, I don’t want to guess when my period starts — I want the app to tell me based on the symptoms I’m logging. If I knew when my cycle started and ended, I wouldn’t need specialized tracking. The whole value of cycle tracking apps is recognizing patterns that people might miss.
Think about it: If you can arbitrarily declare a new cycle based on how you’re feeling, what’s stopping you from just logging “bleeding” in a regular period app and getting the same functionality? What’s desperately needed — and what continues to elude every major health app — is intelligent pattern detection. An app that can analyze your reported symptoms (mood swings, energy dips, headaches, sleep changes, whatever your body is doing) and say, “Hey, based on your data over the last few months, it looks like you might be starting a new cycle now.”
People who don’t menstruate but still have hormonal cycles often experience symptoms that doctors ignore or don’t fully understand. Having data-backed evidence of cyclic patterns can validate their experiences and help them make more informed health decisions.
I think Clue is already halfway there, encouraging users to log mood, energy, and health to “connect the dots” and “see patterns.” The ability to track health patterns “on your terms,” without the pressure of a period, is valuable. But it still asks users to plug in and observe themselves. If my Oura or Whoop or Apple Watch tracks all of these metrics anyway, why can’t it find patterns related to my cycle?
And honestly, if I want to analyze my own symptoms, I’ll just use a regular note-taking app and save myself the privacy worries .