Fitbit pegs “female health tracking" to sell its latest smartwatches

In the face of the ever-growing competition from both big players like Apple and other budget offerings from Chinese companies, Fitbit is now pegging “female health tracking" as its USP to sell latest smartwatches like Versa and Ionic.

As period is a major component of any woman's health, Fitbit’s new feature, which coincided with the Versa launch,  “is designed to help you learn more about your menstrual cycle—and your body—so you can better understand how it affects other aspects of your health and fitness.”

Fitbit’s period-tracking feature that rolls out in the month of May is free and will work not only on the Versa watch, but on the Fitbit Ionic watch and in the mobile app as well. Here's how it works. During the Fitbit onboarding process if you feed in that you’re female, the app will ask if you want to opt in to tracking your menstrual cycle. Once you do that and begin telling the app when your period starts and ends, the app will show your predicted period week as pink, and your predicted fertile window as blue.

Besides things like tracking, two-day-ahead push notifications, and analysis of symptoms like cramps, sleeping, sex, and acne, the new feature also comes with community support and access to doctors’ insight. With the former, users can opt to join a forum that focuses on “periods, birth control, trying to conceive, pregnancy, and perimenopause and menopause to ask questions, swap tips, or share advice.”

With the latter, users can access medical expertise via “judgement-free content developed with Fitbit advisors Katharine White, MD, MPH, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University, and Larry Tiglao, MD, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Stanford Healthcare’s Los Olivos Women’s Medical Group in Los Gatos, CA.”

For Fitbit that just reported dismal holiday earnings, and is no longer the top wearable maker in the US, a feature like menstrual cycle tracking should add to its credentials of more serious health tracking.

Fitbit says that 24 percent of the US adult women use some kind of period-tracking app today and this has been a top-requested feature from Fitbit’s user base.