If you have ever used a period tracking app, you probably already know the routine: You log your symptoms, track your cycle, and hope it predicts something useful. But for Jenny Duan, the co-founder of Clair Health, this wasn’t the case. “I have an irregular cycle,” Duan tells Her Campus. “I was logging data month over month, but nothing changed — and it was a big struggle for me to understand how my hormones were changing and how I could adjust my lifestyle.”
That experience is what pushed Duan, now a 21-year-old Stanford graduate, to build something different. Clair Health, a wrist wearable that tracks hormone patterns in real time, is part of a growing shift toward technology, and is the first wearable designed specifically for women’s health. “I came across the statistic that women weren’t included in clinical trials in the United States until after 1993,” Duan says. “And that just seemed shocking to me. That’s the moment where it made me realize it was time to do something about it.”
Duan met her co-founder, Abhinav Agarwal (CTO), who has a background in health tech and wearables. The two began working together, eventually focusing on continuous hormone monitoring. “We pretty quickly centered around this idea that continuous hormone monitoring is really what is necessary to bridge this woman’s health gap,” she says. And what started as research and testing quickly turned into building Clair Health full-time.Â
Women have been treated like an afterthought for far too long.
Jenny Duan
At first glance, Clair looks like a typical wearable health and wellness tracker: It sits on your wrist and connects to an app. But what it’s doing behind the scenes is much more advanced: The device tracks over 130 physiological signals, including heart rate, body temperature, and even water retention, using that data to estimate hormone activity in real time. “Hormones are essentially the operating system for the female body,” Duan says. “But we did not have a way to track hormones continuously.”
So, this led Duan and Agarwal to develop the technology themselves. “The algorithm that we’ve developed [to monitor] the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and ovaries is not something that anyone else has cracked in the past,” Duan says. “Most wearables only have three or four sensors, but Clair Health actually has 10 sensors [that capture the data we need]. So the information that we get, as well as the quality of the data, is a lot more.”
Clair Health is also addressing a problem that often gets overlooked in wearable tech: many devices are not equally accurate for all users, especially across different skin tones. “While testing, we found that a lot of standard wearables get many different metrics for people with lighter and darker skin, all tones in between,” Duan says. “So, making sure that our readings were accurate for people of all different skin tones was something that we prioritized a lot in our device.”
Instead of just collecting numbers, the goal of the Clair wearable is actually to help you understand what your data means. “You’re getting data, you’re also getting insights and more in-depth pattern tracking,” Duan says. “Most people probably wouldn’t know the difference between one number and another number when it comes to hormones — but if we were to see that in context, like how they’re influencing symptoms and how you can take action on that, that’s what makes it more powerful.”
For women dealing with conditions like PCOS, going through perimenopause, or trying to understand their cycle better, having real-time insight could change everything. Right now, a lot of that understanding comes from guesswork or lab results that are often delayed by hours or days. Clair Health is trying to make cycle tracking more immediate and more personal. “The majority of OB-GYNs do not get even one hour of menopause or perimenopause training in residency,” Duan says. “Women have been treated like an afterthought for far too long.”
Clair Health is also part of a larger shift in how companies approach women’s health. For years, women have been treated as a secondary audience in tech. Products were built first and adjusted later. Now, that approach is starting to change. “I hope that there is a lot more conversation and progress in women’s health,” Duan says. “It is really time to take a stand on that.”
The next generation of wearables is not just about tracking steps or counting calories. It is about understanding your body in a way that feels accurate and useful. And this time, women are not being added in later. For Duan and Clair Health, women are the starting point.