From Clinics to Clicks: Digital Hormone Monitoring and the Reimagining of Women’s Healthcare

This paper presents preliminary findings on the promises embedded in hormone-monitoring technologies marketed to women managing conditions such as endometriosis and PCOS. These devices, promoted as accessible, non-invasive, and empowering tools for tracking hormonal (im-)balance, promise autonomy from traditional healthcare by offering real-time insights. Social media platforms amplify these promises, depicting hormone-monitoring as a path to self-exploration and control, with messaging that often critiques conventional medical approaches as inaccessible, invasive, or dismissive of women’s health needs. Drawing on advertisements and user interactions across social media, this study examines how manufacturers frame these technologies as liberating alternatives to traditional clinical practice. The analysis also considers how these promises resonate with broader critiques of healthcare infrastructure, where social media becomes a stage for renegotiating medical authority and validating personal health experiences outside clinical settings. This research contributes to a growing body of scholarship on hormone-tracking technologies (e.g. Mularoni, 2021; Balfour, 2023; Wilkinson & Roberts, 2023), thereby helping to illuminate how digital health innovations can simultaneously offer new forms of agency and perpetuate critiques of established care systems.