How the Vindi Perimenopause Index is calculated
No black box. Here's exactly what the number means — and what it deliberately doesn't.
The Vindi Perimenopause Index is a single 0–100 score that summarizes how disruptive your symptoms have been across your logged days. It's a weighted average of four symptom clusters, each scored from your daily entries, with the most disruptive symptoms — hot flashes and sleep — weighted highest. It is a tracking tool to share with your doctor, not a diagnosis.
Why a single score at all?
"How have you been feeling?" is almost impossible to answer fairly across three messy months. Some days are fine; the bad ones blur together. A single, consistent score lets you — and your clinician — see the trend and, crucially, whether anything you try actually moves it. The Index isn't meant to label you. It's meant to make a vague, exhausting experience measurable enough to act on.
The four symptom clusters
Each day you log takes seconds. Those entries roll up into four clusters, each scored 0–100, then combined into the overall Index:
Vasomotor
Hot flashes and night sweats — frequency and intensity. The most disruptive and most recognizable cluster.
Sleep
Sleep quality and disruption, which drives so much of how the rest of the day feels.
Mood
Mood ratings plus what you felt — irritable, anxious, low, tearful, swings.
Cognitive
Brain fog and mental clarity — the symptom most often dismissed and hardest to "prove."
Hot flashes and sleep carry the heaviest weight because, across the menopause literature, they are consistently the most disruptive to daily functioning. Mood and cognitive symptoms contribute meaningfully but are weighted slightly lower to keep a few rough days from swamping the overall picture.
What the bands mean
Your score maps to a plain-language band so it reads at a glance — for example Mild, Moderate, Moderate–High, and High. The band is there so a busy clinician can register severity in seconds, and so you can see at a glance whether this month is better or worse than the last.
How treatment response is measured
This is the part that makes the Index more than a diary. When you record something you've tried — HRT, a medication, a supplement, or a lifestyle change — Vindi compares your average Index for the period before you started against the period after, and reports a verdict: improved, worsened, no clear change, or not enough data yet. It needs roughly three logged days on each side to make a fair comparison.
That before-and-after number is exactly what turns "I think it might be helping?" into "my Index went from 68 to 41 over six weeks." Read more about tracking treatment response →
What the Index deliberately does not do
- It does not diagnose perimenopause or anything else. Diagnosis is a clinical judgment, made by your doctor, primarily from your symptoms and history.
- It does not replace blood tests or medical advice. It gives your clinician structured self-reported data to consider alongside everything else.
- Manually added wearable numbers (sleep, resting heart rate) ride alongside your symptoms but do not change your score — they're context, not inputs.
No card, no password. Log a few days and your score appears.
Questions
Is the Vindi Index a medical diagnosis?
No. It's a self-reported tracking score designed to be discussed with a qualified clinician. It does not diagnose perimenopause or any condition.
How many days do I need to log before it's meaningful?
A score appears after your first log, but trends and treatment comparisons get more reliable with consistent logging — roughly three days before and after a change for a treatment verdict.
Do my Apple Watch or Oura numbers change my score?
No. Objective numbers you add sit alongside your symptoms as context and never alter the Index, which is built from how you report feeling.
Reference scales: Menopause Rating Scale (MRS); Greene Climacteric Scale. These are established, validated clinical symptom questionnaires; Vindi's Index is modeled on their symptom domains and is not a validated diagnostic instrument.