Many fitness- and health-tracking apps and devices, including Apple Health and Watch, don't take pregnancy, or any other health condition, into account
I'm not a super fit person. I am considered a healthy weight, and I exercise simply because I enjoy eating and drinking whatever I want. Tweets: @dana_flo , @skrishna , @sara_ann_marie , and @carnage4life Tweets: Dana Floberg / @dana_flo : Most fitness tracking apps “hadn't bothered to consider the idea that some of its users might want to procreate.” Intentionally or otherwise, algorithms often leave pregnant, injured and chronically ill folks behind. http://twitter.com/... Swapna Krishna / @skrishna : Last week, I tweeted about how fitness and weight-tracking apps should have a “pregnancy mode.” It became a Twitter moment. Today, I wrote about the experience, what fixes developers can make, and what I learned (tech fails a lot of us) over at @engadget: http://www.engadget.com/... Sara Wachter-Boettcher / @sara_ann_marie : “I faced 3 months of being pestered about my activity level on a daily basis. I couldn't tell the app, ‘Hey, this is actually what is healthy for me right now,’ and because of that it had become completely useless.” @skrishna on pregnancy + health apps: http://www.engadget.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : A concrete example of how lack of diverse teams hurts products is how fitness tracking apps including Apple Health fail to account for pregnancy and tell pregnant women they're overweight. A problem easily prevented by having more women on these teams.http://www.engadget.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands in the middle of a running critique of consumer health tech: the same tracking stack that promises insight sells blind spots instead. [[a:935602|Period-tracking apps were found to be built more for marketer and medical-company data collection than for women]], and months later [[a:938870|popular apps were caught shipping sensitive signals like intent to get pregnant to Facebook through its analytics SDK]]. Against that backdrop, Apple Health and Watch telling pregnant women they are overweight is not an isolated bug but the platform-tier version of the same design failure.
The relationships in play point at a cause, not just a symptom: development teams that lack diversity ship products calibrated to a narrow default user, so pregnancy, injury, and chronic illness fall outside the model entirely.
First-order effects
- Pregnant users of Apple Health and Watch get actively wrong outputs — flagged as overweight rather than recognized as pregnant — which erodes trust in the platform's core health metrics at the moment those metrics matter most.
- App makers whose algorithms never considered procreation face a credibility gap with exactly the demographic reproductive-health apps like Glow have been courting since 2015.
Second-order effects
- Because these products monetize the data they collect, the misclassification compounds downstream: pregnancy-adjacent signals flow into ad systems, feeding the pattern where period-tracking apps serve marketers first and the call for auto-suppressing tone-deaf ads aimed at grieving parents becomes a product requirement rather than an op-ed.
- Tracker accuracy work showing sensors thrown off by darker skin or gait differences (studies on commercial fitness tracker accuracy) widens the indictment from one excluded group to a systematic calibration problem across demographics.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer health platforms drift toward a two-tier market: general-purpose trackers that quietly fail anyone off the default profile, and condition-specific apps that fill the gap — while regulators and press increasingly treat health-data handling, not just feature sets, as the differentiator.
- The durable fix runs through who builds these products: hiring and design processes that widen the default user become a competitive moat, since retrofitting pregnancy, injury, and chronic-condition support into shipped metric models is costlier than designing for them upfront.
The trend: Consumer health tracking is being forced to reckon with a narrow default user, as pregnancy, chronic illness, and skin-tone bias expose that mainstream fitness platforms were designed around — and monetize — everyone else.