Have you ever opened CPP Tracker on the eHive App, dutifully answered a string of questions, synced your Fitbit, and thought: why am I doing all of this? What is all this data actually for? If you have been enrolled in one of our studies for chronic pelvic pain, such as CPP Tracker or d2prom, that is a very reasonable question. Every extra tap and every sync costs you time and energy on top of managing pain, fatigue, and medical appointments. The point of CPP Tracker is to finally measure this condition in a way that reflects what your days actually look like, and the multiple streams of data allow us to do this rigorously.
Daily Check-Ins, Weekly Surveys, and Fitbit: What Each Tells Us About CPP
CPP Tracker asks about your pain, activities, sleep, mood, and other symptoms at different time points—some questions are daily, some weekly, and some of the information comes from your Fitbit. Each of these pieces does something slightly different. Short daily questions catch the ups and downs: the sudden flares, the “good days,” and the in-between days you might otherwise forget. Weekly questions zoom out to look at the bigger picture: how much CPP is affecting work, relationships, or getting through routine tasks. Fitbit data fill in the background with more granular information on how you are moving and sleeping when pain spikes or calms down, without you having to remember all the details later.
Designing CPP-Specific Digital Measures for Clinical Usability
Behind the scenes, we are using these answers and signals to build and test new CPP-specific questions. In research terms, these are called “patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs),” but in practical terms they are structured ways of turning your experience into numbers and patterns that doctors and researchers can actually act on. We are not just trying to make pretty charts; we are checking whether these questionnaires are truly capturing what life with chronic pelvic pain is like, and whether shifts in your scores line up with real changes you feel in your body and daily life.
To our knowledge, this study is the first to be fully designed around creating and validating PROMs based specifically for female chronic pelvic pain disorders, rather than borrowing tools made for other conditions and hoping they fit. That means we are paying attention to things like pelvic pain with sex, bladder and bowel-related symptoms, and the unpredictable timing of flares—issues that are often sidelined or oversimplified in more generic pain scales. When the tools are not built for CPP, important details can be lost, which makes it harder to diagnose accurately and tailor treatments. The goal is to build tools that “speak the language” of CPP instead of forcing your experience into boxes that do not quite fit. So how could this actually change a clinic visit fo