How To Add Birth Control To Flo App

Natural Cycles App Natural Cycles

Flo. Ovia. Fertility Friend. The past few years have seen an explosion of apps to help women track their menstrual cycles and either conceive or avoid pregnancy. There are currently as many every bit ane,000 such apps on the marketplace, with some 200 one thousand thousand users around the globe. This yr a European regulatory bureau even approved an app every bit a form of contraception.

This comes at a fourth dimension when women in many countries are rejecting traditional hormonal forms of birth control due to fears of side furnishings or an increasing cultural emphasis on "natural" health. Some experts applaud the new apps as a manner technology can help women take control of their fertility. Others worry they're just dressing up old, mistake-prone forms of contraception in high tech dress.

In February of this year, Natural Cycles became the first app canonical for utilise in the European union as a contraceptive. The app was created past Swedish physicist Elina Berglund, who was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson particle.  Wanting a non-hormonal way of preventing pregnancy, Berglund developed an algorithm that uses torso temperature data and information virtually menstruation to predict a woman'southward fertility window. Natural Cycles works in conjunction with a special thermometer sensitive enough to annotation changes in basal torso temperature—the temperature of the trunk during residual—which increases after ovulation due to the hormone progesterone. On fertile days, the app gives users a red calorie-free, telling them to avoid sex or utilise contraception. If the light is light-green, the user tin can in theory have unprotected sex without worrying about an unwanted pregnancy.

"Women effectually the earth are interested in exploring effective non-hormonal, non-invasive forms of contraception—and now they accept a new, clinically verified and regulatory approved selection to choose from," Berglund told the press.

A trial involving some 4,000 women showed that near vii percent of Natural Cycle'south users got meaning through "typical use"—that is, use with some user errors. This is similar to the failure charge per unit for nascency control pills and hormonal nascence control patches and injections, and much lower than the failure charge per unit of condoms for typical employ, which is about 18 per centum. Other apps haven't gone through clinical trials or sought approval as contraceptives, and then it'due south hard to know how Natural Cycles could fare in comparing.

Menstruation-tracking apps have been pop for several years now, and market inquiry suggests they're on track to become even more than ubiquitous. Flo uses car learning to predict a adult female's next period based on information she inputs. Flow Tracker is an interactive calendar that can be exported to email to share with the user'south doc. Clue tracks period dates and helps predict the side by side 1, while also keeping tabs on information about mood, pain and more. These apps are substantially loftier-tech versions of the quondam paper calendars many women used to proceed.

Many of these apps offer predictions about a adult female's fertile window—the five- or six-day period directly earlier, during and after ovulation, the only time of the month a woman tin get pregnant. Some explicitly sell themselves as formulation aids. Glow, for example, has pages of user success stories featuring blurry photos of doubled-lined pregnancy tests.

Natural Cycles creator Elina Berglund Natural Cycles

But enquiry has suggested that these apps are often inaccurate. A contempo report, published last year in the periodicalObstetrics & Gynecology, looked at 53 catamenia- and fertility-tracking apps and websites claiming to predict a woman'southward fertile window. Of those 53, merely iv accurately predicted the window. Some gave windows as broad equally 12 days, which is about twice as long as women are actually fertile. Others gave windows as brusk as iv days, when in fact it's possible for sperm to live for v days in a woman's reproductive tract. Few apps actually predicted the precise engagement of ovulation. This date is of import, equally a woman is much more likely to conceive by having sexual activity on the day before or of her ovulation.

While apps like Glow may merits high success rates in helping women conceive, the information is murky. Is a adult female conceiving considering the app is helpful? Or is the kind of woman who uses an app more than likely to excogitate, considering of loftier motivation levels leading to more sex and more than careful monitoring of fertility signs?

For many, the stakes are higher when information technology comes to preventing pregnancy. Though the apps themselves claim to aid in conception, no app before Natural Cycles has gotten official approving as a form of birth command. The app currently has more than a quarter million users, who pay $ten a month or $eighty a year. Though the app is only approved in Europe, in that location's nothing to forestall women anywhere in the globe from using it.

Mary Jane Minkin, a clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine, says she started noticing fertility apps gaining traction two or three years ago. She's wary of women—specially very immature women—relying on them as their sole course of nascence control.

"Basically all you're talking well-nigh is natural family planning methods," she says.

The main problem is that basal body temperatures are "notoriously unreliable," Minkin says. You have to take your temperature early in the morning, before you've even gotten out of bed to get to the bathroom. Existence sick, hungover or sleeping poorly tin affect the effect. And, while some women have very regular cycles, many are and so irregular that data from i wheel does very little to predict the next.

Minkin thinks apps like Natural Cycles would be appropriate for couples who plan to conceive in the most future, so wouldn't be upset with an 'oops' (Natural Cycle's creators concord). Just for women who absolutely don't want to be pregnant but are wary of hormonal nascence control, Minkin suggests a much older, lower-tech option: the copper IUD. A tiny, t-shaped piece of plastic wrapped in copper, information technology is implanted in the uterus, where information technology repels sperm and prevents implantation. Until a few years ago, this kind of IUD was simply recommended for women who'd already had a baby. But that restriction is gone, Minkin says. 1 IUD tin can prevent pregnancy for 10 years.

"You lot don't even accept to recall most it, and it gives yous extremely reliable contraception," she says.

In that location have been technological advances that practise make natural planning family methods potentially more than accurate, Minkin says. Ovulation predictor kits (OPKs) are strips of newspaper that test urine for signs of the hormones of ovulation, giving women a good idea of when they're about fertile. The results could theoretically exist combined with tracking algorithms to make more than accurate apps.

Information science Health Mobile Phones Reproduction Women in Science

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/apps-can-help-you-get-pregnant-but-should-you-use-them-as-contraceptive-180964557/

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