Smart Tampons

my.Flow designed a Bluetooth-enabled tampon. The logic is there: knowing when to change without checking is a real micro-problem. A sensor detects saturation, pings your phone, everyone moves on. Competent engineering, sensible product idea.

The strangeness isn’t the tech itself—smart textiles, IoT health devices, all that exists. It’s adding network connectivity to something so purely biological and private. Outsourcing awareness of your own body to notifications. It solves one problem (not knowing when to change) by introducing another (app dependency, the weirdness of your period becoming data). From outside, it looks like solving a minor inconvenience by making things more complicated.

I’m curious whether it took off, but that’s not really my question to answer. What sticks is the impulse: the reflex to digitize everything, to add sensors and notifications to bodily experience because the infrastructure exists. Not malicious, just the default assumption that making something measurable makes it better. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes you’re just adding distance between yourself and your own body.