A new approach to monitoring hormones to better understand women’s health
23 Mar 2026 - Rohini Gupta
Researcher Elena Venturelli from the University of Bristol and her supervisors are working to improve a continuous hormone monitoring device called U-RHYTHM, designed to collect samples from the body every 15–20 minutes throughout the day and night. If successful, the technology could allow scientists to monitor multiple hormones continuously and understand how they respond to factors such as sleep, stress, exercise, and lifestyle.
This is important because traditional blood tests only provide a single snapshot of hormone levels, which does not capture how hormones fluctuate over time. Understanding these changes is especially important in women’s health, where hormone dynamics play a key role but are still not fully understood. Elena explains that current methods are limited: “I think it has a negative effect on how women’s health conditions are treated because we’re not able to fully understand hormone fluctuations and hormone sensitivities.”
I think it has a negative effect on how women’s health conditions are treated because we’re not able to fully understand hormone fluctuations and hormone sensitivities.
Elena Venturelli
The device is worn like a belt and includes a very small tube that is inserted just below the surface of the skin. A saline solution flows through the tube, similar to fluids used in hospitals. Hormones and other molecules present in the surrounding tissue diffuse across a small membrane into this solution and are collected for later analysis in the lab. Importantly, nothing is introduced into the body; the device only collects substances from the tissue.
So far, the device has been successfully used to measure cortisol, a hormone related to stress. However, measuring female sex hormones such as oestradiol and progesterone has proven much more challenging. These hormones are highly hydrophobic, meaning they do not dissolve easily in water and tend to stick to surfaces. As a result, they often become trapped inside the tubing of the device, making them difficult to recover and analyse.
To solve this problem, they are studying how these hormones behave in solution and testing additives that may help stabilise them. One additive being investigated is cyclodextrin, a molecule that can form complexes around hydrophobic compounds and help keep them dissolved. In the laboratory, samples containing oestrogen or progesterone are prepared with different concentrations of cyclodextrin to study how the hormones interact with the additive and determine the most effective concentration. To better understand these interactions, the researchers carried out experiments at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source. Using the Zoom small-angle neutron scattering instrument, they were able to study how the hormones interact with cyclodextrin in solution and whether stable complexes are formed.
This technology could significantly expand the types of studies researchers are able to carry out. This could help scientists better understand hormone-related conditions and provide a clearer picture of how hormones interact and change over time and could open the door to more personalised and effective approaches to manage women’s health. As Elena explains, “It just opens up the possibility of doing so much more research that currently is very difficult to do.”
It just opens up the possibility of doing so much more research that currently is very difficult to do.
Elena Venturelli
