Women’s health data could empower women and individuals experiencing menstrual or female reproductive health-related processes to better understand themselves and manage their health across their life course. However, lifelong health tracking remains a challenge and existing menstrual health technologies often fail to meet diverse needs or enhance menstrual health literacy.

Objectives

1. Personalized Menstrual Health Tracking: Develop a customizable app that integrates self-reported and wearable data to provide personalized insights, addressing the unique needs of menstruating individuals, particularly those with irregular cycles.
2. Enhance Menstrual Health Literacy: Improve users’ understanding of their menstrual health through tailored visualizations, feedback, and education, fostering greater health literacy and awareness.
3. Open-Source Platform for Research: Establish CyMe as an open-source resource for research studies in healthcare, clinical trials, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), focusing on female-specific data and gender-sensitive health solutions. Ensure users have complete control over their health data, with robust privacy measures that protect sensitive information throughout the tracking process.

Approach

We adopted a human-centered design approach to design, develop, and evaluate CyMe [si:][mi:], a customizable menstrual health app offering tailored interfaces and personalized insights, integrating self-reported and passively tracked data via wearables. Preliminary results suggest that CyMe’s customization features improve user engagement, accessibility, and menstrual health awareness.

Scientific and Social Contributions

1. Scientific Advancements: We envision CyMe becoming a valuable, open-source resource for research incorporating sex- and gender-specific data in health- or non-health-related research studies.
2. Social Impact: CyMe aims to improve menstrual health literacy, particularly for users with irregular cycles, by providing personalized insights and empowering users to take control of their health. Ultimately, this work responds to the call for intersectional feminist Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research to address digital health’s gender inequities using a practical and inclusive implementation.

We actively engage potential users throughout the development process. Check back here regularly for the latest invitations to participate in upcoming user studies, surveys, and pre-tests:

coming soon

Principe, M., Stebler, D., Sou, D., Kowatsch, T., Nißen, M., CyMe [si:][mi:]: Personalized and Seamless Menstrual Health Tracking, Mensch und Computer 2024 – Workshopband. Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.. MCI: Demos: Interactive Systems or Demonstrators. Karlsruhe, Germany. 1.-4. September 2024, 10.18420/muc2024-mci-demo-369

Sou, D., Stebler, D., Principe, M., Kowatsch, T., Nißen, M., Please CyMe: Towards Enhancing Menstrual Health Awareness through Customization and Personalized Visualization in a Menstrual Health App, In Proc. of Mensch und Computer 2024 (MuC ’24). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 674–683, 10.1145/3670653.3677475

Nißen, M., Sou, D., Kowatsch, T., Digital Female Health: Advancing Women-Centric Human-Computer Interaction Research, Mensch und Computer 2024 – Workshopband. Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.. MCI-WS14: Bedürfnisse sind unterschiedlich und verändern sich, Methoden auch? Umdenken bei Forschungsmethoden. Karlsruhe, Germany 1.-4. September 2024, 10.18420/muc2024-mci-ws14-199 .

Marinja Principe, Davinny Sou, Prof. Dr. Tobias Kowatsch, Dr. Marcia Nißen

Marinja Principe, Debs Stebler

Sina Cäcilia Klerings, Dana Rapp, Lena-Noelle Fischer

January 2024 – today