Fertility Apps Under Scrutiny For Effectivity, Can It Really Tell When You're Ready For A Baby?

We have come to rely on apps for many things in our lives, but there are some things in life that just you just can't say, "Is there an app for that?" Fertility apps are some such things that a study found is not very effective in telling you when you're ready to have a baby-or when you shouldn't be active if you don't want to have one.

According to researchers at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington D.C., the 100-some apps used they tested did not help users determine their readiness to conceive.

Dr. Marguerite Duane, the lead researcher of the study said that more and more women are using these apps to determine their fertility to decide whether they want to be pregnant or not. This is called the fertility awareness-based method (FABM).

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AOCG) said that fertility awareness involves knowing when a woman can get pregnant. It is "knowing and recognizing when the fertile time occurs in the menstrual cycle."

The study revealed that there were a minimum of 55% of the apps they studied contained disclaimers stating that the program was not a tool to help avoid pregnancy.

Tracking a woman's menstrual cycle and calculating the ovulation days are the foundations of the fertility apps. The ovulation period is the time that would be most appropriate for women to become pregnant, or to be careful to avoid having a baby.

The app also tracks a woman's temperature when their body is at rest, called the basal body temperature, which is also another indicator of a woman's ovulation period. The ACOG warns, however, that basal body temperatures usually increase only 2 to 3 days after ovulation making it a bad indicator of whether or not a woman can become pregnant.

Thirty of the apps were able to accurately predict days when a woman is fertile, while the others do not. Out of the thirty, there were fertility apps that had perfect accuracy in the tests. These apps, however, required women to undergo FABM training before using the app.