Ladies, it’s time to talk. According to a recent Fitbit survey¹, 80 percent of you (80!) don’t know how many phases are in the menstrual cycle and more than 70 percent of you (70!) are unable to correctly identify the average length of a cycle.

Honestly, those stats are shocking but not all that surprising. After all, many women’s sexual health education stops after grade school, if they get one at all. That’s why Fitbit is excited to announce the launch of one of the company’s most requested features: female health tracking.

This new in-app experience (available to all Fitbit users age 13 and older**) and on-device experience (for Fitbit Charge 3, Fitbit Ionic, Fitbit Versa users) 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. And that’s just the beginning.

Below, what you can expect at launch—and beyond.

In-app period tracking: Never get caught by surprise again. Log your period, record symptoms, and opt into receiving push notifications two days before and on the day of your predicted period start date. This allows you to have the opportunity to compare all your stats in one place.

Fitbit on-wrist integration: Track where you are in your cycle, view when your period is expected, and see your upcoming estimated fertile window in the Fitbit Today personalized health dashboard on Charge 3, Versa, or Ionic. 

News you can use: Learn about the menstrual cycle, ovulation, fertility, and more with 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.

Community support: Join new Fitbit Community Groups focused on periods, birth control, trying to conceive, pregnancy, and perimenopause and menopause to ask questions, swap tips, or share advice.  

Better body knowledge: See how your cycle and symptoms change month to month and uncover the impact your menstrual cycle has on your overall health. By having all of your health and fitness information in one place and looking at your data over time, you can better understand connections between your activity, sleep, and cycle symptoms.

More productive doctor visits: Simple tracking of your symptoms and menstrual cycle data in the Fitbit app allows you to be more informed for discussions with your doctor about the specific timing and details of your symptoms, giving your doctor a clearer picture of your menstrual cycle for more personalized care. Female health tracking will also chart your cycle trends over time which can help your doctor determine what is normal for you symptom-wise, versus what may warrant additional attention.

Personalized insights: The more consistently you log, the smarter the female-health-tracking algorithm gets. In the future, as the database of female-health metrics grows, this data may help enable Fitbit to deliver even more insights, such as how your cycle impacts your activity, sleep, weight and nutrition, and potentially how these things can affect your cycle.

Much-needed innovation: Female health is not an area that has garnered as much broad, population-level study as other areas in healthcare. By potentially creating one of the largest databases of anonymized female health metrics in the world, Fitbit has the opportunity to help drive positive health outcomes and could give Fitbit, healthcare, and research professionals an unprecedented ability to study menstrual cycles and women’s health with real-world data in the future.

All Fitbit users² who have identified themselves as female in their Fitbit profile will receive a notification that female health tracking is available. You can choose to opt-in and complete onboarding, or simply opt out.

Don’t identify as female but still want to use this feature? Tap “Edit” at the bottom of your Fitbit mobile dashboard (or press and hold a dashboard tile until they all start to wiggle) and then add the female health tracking tile.