People who want to have children and people who don’t have something in common. Both want surety about when they’re most likely to fall pregnant. So when Apple announced Cycle Tracking on the Apple Watch Series 8, I was intrigued. This was (in theory) my ticket to fully optimise my month and remain child-free in the process.
Tracking your period is an eternal inconvenience. Every day there are new symptoms and fresh changes to take into consideration, and I would love to have a device do the heavy lifting for me. A push notification sure beats guesswork, or peeing on a stick every day. But the information I've gotten from wearing the Apple Watch Series 8 to bed for months, isn’t any more accurate than tracking my period in Clue. If anything, it has just confused me more.
When you think about Cycle Tracking, the first thing that comes to mind is generally trying to have a child, closely followed by trying not to have a child. Regardless of which category you fall into, if you’re a person who menstruates - especially someone who isn’t on hormonal birth control - then your life literally revolves around a 28ish day cycle. Period.
Frankly, it is exhausting, and I can’t believe that my choices are to deal with this my entire life, convince a doctor to give me a hysterectomy, or go back on the disaster that is hormonal birth control. I would love to outsource the daily tracking and analysis, but right now Apple’s Cycle Tracking isn’t going to cut it.
This year I set out to learn as much as I possibly could about optimising my life based around that cycle, but it is a veritable nightmare. I cram the first two weeks of my cycle with meetings, creative projects, social gatherings, and intense workouts, before retreating back into my pyjamas to do admin tasks and light stretching for the rest of it. But for friends who have struggled to get pregnant, it's a similar cycle. Temperatures, and testing, and tracking. We’re just looking for different results.
While period tracking apps are helpful tools, without minute tracking and testing we’re all just making assumptions. In addition to the usual manual tracking, the Apple Watch Series 8 and Ultra use the Wrist Temperature feature to track your basal body temperature (BBT), using that baseline to make predictions about your cycle.
BBT measurements have been used as a source of birth control and family planning since before contraceptive pills. Close tracking can show an increase of 0.3°C to 0.7°C in BBT just after ovulation which continues until the start of menstruation. This method of tracking is widely suggested for those looking to get pregnant, but the measurements need to be consistent and ideally taken at the same time every morning. There is plenty of room for human error, but Apple’s wrist temperature tracking has the potential to take this out of the equation.
To make the most out of Apple’s tracking, you’ll need to wear your watch to sleep every night, and you’ll also need to manually track your flow in the Apple Health app. This part of Apple’s equation isn’t any more sophisticated than any other period tracker; you’ll manually input information like flow, symptoms, and sexual activity. The more you use it, the more data it has, and the better your predictions become.
If anything I found Apple’s tracking to be limited, and the user experience to be less intuitive compared to others in the market. There is almost too much data to take in at a glance, but at the same time not enough. You’ll get a week’s worth of tracking at the top, which is a weird choice for a month-long cycle, followed by an ovulation estimate which only shows three weeks of data, then cycle history, cycle deviations, factors, and finally a summary at the very bottom. There is a lot happening, but you don’t get an overarching view on the landing page. UX aside, the app uses your cycle data to make predictions about when your period will start, and when you are most fertile based on the input data.
Throughout the night the watch measures your wrist, and the external temperature to determine your BBT. It takes five days to calculate your baseline temperature, but to connect this to cycle tracking, you’ll need to wear it to sleep for at least two cycles. Only after this will you start getting predictions, but if you miss a night or two you’ll need to start from scratch.
Since the latest Apple Watch was released, I have tracked using the Series 8, Apple Health, and the period tracker Clue. Both Clue and Apple Health predicted that I ovulated on the 13th day of my cycle, which is a fair and standard calculation for the average uterus haver.
Wrist Temperature - the actual ovulation predictor - comes in later. Too late actually. Once your temperature readings begin to even out, the Apple Watch sends a retroactive notification letting you know the day that you may have ovulated. Over time these retrospective estimates should give you a good indication of when you may be fertile, to do with the information what you will.
For the sake of testing, I pitched these predictions against over-the-counter ovulation tests to see how they fare. According to all the sticks I peed on in the name of science, I ovulated anywhere between the 13th and 15th day. This makes the manual data input from both Apple Health and Clue’s predictions pretty spot on. However, my retrospective predictions from my wrist temperature say that I ovulate between day 9 and 11. See, it is confusing.
Four days is a stark difference, or should I say a stork difference?
Pee-stuck tests obviously include that human error the Apple Watch aims to eliminate, but wrist temperature measurements aren’t devoid of variables either. Whether you had a wine or two before bed, if you’re fighting a virus, or even the external temperature can affect your wrist temperature day-to-day. There is every chance that these factors influenced my own data in the same way that any over-the-counter testing might. But I'm more inclined to trust the seven tests that boast over 99% accuracy in detecting the right hormone, than a new piece of software.
No matter which side of the procreating fence you fall into, I wouldn't be relying on your Apple Watch just yet. Whether you’re like me, and are hoping to plan your life around your cycle, or you want to plan a new life around it, there are more tried and tested ways to go about it. But, this does feel like a step in the right direction.
In a world dominated by patriarchal bias, the tech industry is just another place catered towards men. It is refreshing to see the biggest player in consumer tech create something purely for women and others with uteruses. For Apple, 2022 has been a big year of new ideas that haven’t quite fulfilled their potential just yet. Features like Crash Detection, the Dynamic Island, and Cycle Tracking are still in their infancy, but knowing Apple we have years of refinement to come.
Anula Wiwatowska
Offsite Editorial Lead | Instagram
Related Articles
