Bluetooth tampon aims to end 'period anxiety'

The idea is laudable: What woman hasn’t wished for the day when she would know exactly when to change her tampon before it becomes a bloody disaster?

But ... this Bluetooth tampon idea from my.Flow might need some refining.

The San Francisco-based company, which apparently consists of happy, kind, intelligent young entrepreneurs working with cotton wadding, has a patent-pending tampon monitor that allows a woman to track her flow via Bluetooth. A wire connecting the tampon to a clip-on device will send information to an app that keeps tabs on the tampon’s saturation level.

The goal is to “obliterate period anxiety,” according to the promotional video. The website further explains: “We also want to empower anyone experiencing a period with knowledge and confidence about their bodies, from the minute-ly to the monthly level, with the intention of changing the nature of the topic of the period.”

In an April 30 post, one of the team members said she was the first to test the product.

“I strapped up to our lovely PCB (printed circuit board) and was able to determine that my tampon was 42% full within 2 hours of insertion. So among other awesome implications, my pants were spared :-). Pretty neat stuff, huh?”

However, Cosmopolitan writer Hannah Smothers pinpoints a few things about the product that concern her. Like that connecting wire.

“I’m probably clumsier than most people, but a big concern I have with this thing is what if the tampon-sensor string gets caught on something? Would the tampon not rip out? Or maybe it’s magnetic, like Apple’s innovative magnetic laptop chargers so you don’t fling your computer off the table every time someone trips on the charging cord.”

Because if that’s not resolved, there goes the company’s whole goal of providing a “solution to menstruation mortification.”

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