Bluetooth for Everything, Including That

The internet of things was always going to end up here. Once you’ve connected your refrigerator and your toothbrush and your door lock, the logical extension is to quantify the body itself—all of it, without exception. my.Flow, an American startup that surfaced in 2016, built a bluetooth tampon that monitors flow rate and sends a phone notification when it needs changing.

The pitch landed in the language every fem-tech startup deployed at the time: empowerment, reclaiming control, replacing outdated solutions with modern technology. And to be fair, the problem it was solving is real—toxic shock syndrome from leaving a tampon in too long is a genuine medical concern, and the anxiety of not knowing, especially in situations where checking isn’t easy, is a legitimate inconvenience. I’m not mocking the problem.

But there’s a specific strain of tech-industry thinking that believes every human experience improves when you add data to it. The body as input device. Bodily functions as metrics to be tracked, logged, graphed, optimized. The discomfort I feel about my.Flow isn’t about the subject matter—it’s about the assumption underlying the whole thing: that the solution to living in a body is to make the body legible to software. That if your tampon could just ping you, you’d have more control over your life.

The Bluetooth clip was designed to be unobtrusive. Presumably the engineering was more involved than the elevator pitch suggested. But the image sticks: a notification, on your phone, from inside your own body. The logical next step in a decade that had already convinced people to wear their heart rates on their wrists. We are all, apparently, data waiting to be collected.