f you want to track your menstrual cycle today, you download an app that quietly hands your most intimate health data over to remote servers. Designer kati created a personal menstrual cycle tracking device named Clotty to stop playing that game entirely. As kati stated, she wanted Clotty’s design to scream “HELLO I AM A PERIOD TRACKING DEVICE” and at this she absolutely succeeded.
Instead of a stealthy pastel app hidden among your phone icons, Clotty is built into a palm-sized, uterus-shaped printed circuit board complete with touchpad ovaries. It uses a microcontroller chip, color display, and a small variety of sensors. This is hardware designed with a cheerful lack of discretion, making your private health data impossible to ignore or accidentally sweep under a digital rug.
Total Isolation From Corporate Prying
The point of Clotty goes well beyond its bold shape, reaching straight into what it refuses to do with your information. Clotty will never quietly upload one’s menstrual tracking data to a remote server. Nor will it harvest, mishandle, disclose, or sell that same data.
Clotty will never quietly upload one’s menstrual tracking data to a remote server.
This absolute offline quarantine cuts straight through the paranoia surrounding modern health apps and endless data monetization. Your cycle stays on your physical device, completely out of reach from corporate servers and data brokers.
Running DOOM to Prove a Point
Of course, no custom piece of hardware escapes the workshop without a mandatory test of its processing grit. Clotty can run DOOM using kati’s modified version of the software. Game-ifying the menstrual tracking process with a playful digital pet aspect and running a classic shooter might sound like a joke, but it anchors the device's core validity in hacker culture.
Right now it is still in its early stages, and basically at the point that everything works hardware-wise and the essentials are there for software, but it remains in active development. You can find updates and follow its progress on Clotty’s GitHub repository as features get fleshed out. If you want to see similar work, kati designed another project called the Slightly Sentient D20.
Clotty is not a polished consumer product you can buy off a shelf today, but it is a sharp middle finger to cloud surveillance. It proves that personal health tracking can exist entirely offline, wrapped in a uterus-shaped board that plays DOOM and answers to no one else.