Tonya Kuxhausen began wearing an Oura ring in late 2021. A 55-year-old nurse in Minneapolis, she kept the band on her finger nearly all the time: during emergency-room shifts, overnight while she slept and everywhere in between.
She came to rely on it even more after she developed long Covid in 2022. A few years later, when her periods became erratic as she approached menopause, the ring’s alerts felt less helpful. “You better take it easy today,” Kuxhausen recalled the app warning, as if “something really awful’s going to happen.”
“I’m not dying,” she recalled thinking. Still, when Oura introduced a 22-question menopause survey in its app this May, Kuxhausen decided to give it a try. Oura is among a handful of technology companies that have turned their attention to women in midlife like Kuxhausen: Whoop and Apple also announced new menopause-related features this year.
What these tools measure, and how much meaningful or actionable information they can give women about their bodies, varies widely. Here’s what to know about them.
What the health trackers measure
The features differ across devices, but they all rely on women’s own reports of their cycles and symptoms.
Apple’s is a simple alert, notifying women they may have entered perimenopause. Oura offers a symptom score based on the questionnaire and Whoop aims to predict when women can anticipate certain menopause symptoms.
Apple’s feature launched last month: The Health app now sends notices to women 40 or older whose cycles begin to vary. It uses the data women have logged, according to Apple, not data the watch’s sensors have picked up.
The app asks women to confirm that their cycles have become irregular, then tells them that this can happen for many reasons, including perimenopause. It suggests women talk to their doctors within the year, and offers a PDF of their last 12 months of cycles they can bring to an appointment.
Oura’s score, based on the menopause questionnaire, represents the degree to which symptoms may be disrupting a woman’s daily life. Sleep and temperature trends are displayed alongside the score to help explain it, said Chris Curry, an obstetrician-gynaecologist and Oura’s clinical director of women’s health.
The ring cannot determine whether a woman is in perimenopause, she said, but it can “make the path to conversation easier,” including by generating a report women can download and share with their doctors.
With Whoop, a woman logs her symptoms – cramps, bloating, headaches, mood swings, fatigue and brain fog are on the list; hot flashes and night sweats are not – and the app predicts when she might expect that symptom again.
As a woman’s cycles become less regular, the app gives a predicted time range for her next period instead of a specific date, said Emily Capodilupo, Whoop’s senior vice president of research, algorithms and data.
Beyond these features, some devices promote other paid services aimed at women in midlife. With a member’s permission, Oura can share their survey results and sleep data with telehealth companies like Maven and Wisp, and Whoop sells a US$299 (RM1,221) blood panel through Quest Diagnostics.
Dr Stephanie Faubion, the medical director of The Menopause Society and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health, wears an Oura ring and a Whoop band and said she sees value in the patterns health trackers can uncover. In some cases, she said, a wearable might help reveal a health condition a woman had incorrectly attributed to menopause, like obstructive sleep apnea. But the specific menopause features generally do not track anything the devices were not already monitoring, she said, and they are mostly built around menstrual cycles.
Where health trackers may fall short
Despite all the data these devices collect, most of the metrics they report are still estimates. When a wearable tells a woman how much REM or deep sleep she had during the night, “that is not equivalent to measuring what’s happening in the brain,” said Fiona Baker, who directs the human sleep research program at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, California.
Some of the tools also lean heavily on heart-rate variability, the small differences in timing between heartbeats, as a gauge of how much stress the body is under. But when heart-rate variability shifts, the number says nothing about why, Baker said: “Was it due to age? Was it due to menopause? Was it due to unhealthy lifestyle behaviours?”
Kelly Baron, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Utah who is studying treatments for perimenopausal sleep problems, said some people are worse off with more sleep data, because they can develop an unhealthy preoccupation with it. (Baron and her colleagues coined the term “orthosomnia” to describe this.)
The sleep-stage charts are “a really pretty picture,” Baron said. “But there’s not a lot that we do with that.”
There’s also the risk that a symptom may be labelled menopause-related too quickly. Palpitations, for example, could have other causes that need evaluation, Faubion said.
Women don’t need a device to know when they are experiencing hot flashes and mood changes. And some of the metrics that might be most useful for menopausal women can’t be reliably tracked by wearables yet: Faubion gave the example of blood pressure, which “hockey sticks up at menopause.” Heart disease is the leading cause of death among women in the United States, and high blood pressure is one of its biggest drivers.
Kuxhausen, the nurse, still wears her Oura ring. It has helped her understand how food, alcohol and late nights affect her sleep. But it did not reveal much about menopause that she did not already know.
“You already feel betrayed by your body,” she said. The last thing she wanted, she said, was a reminder “that you’re not doing well enough.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
