Current Medical Research: Summer/Fall 2016 †
Many fertility applications (apps) have been developed for smart phones and other handheld electronic devices that are designed to help women monitor their menstrual cycle and for use in achieving and avoiding pregnancy. Most of the devices involve daily monitoring of natural indicators of fertility, i.e., cervical mucus changes, basal body temperature, cervical position, and luteinizing hormone (LH) surges in the urine. Most require daily monitoring and recording of these indicators and have some type of underlying calendar-based algorithm. Few of the apps have been tested for their accuracy or effectiveness to help women avoid or achieve pregnancy. A “simple to use” fertility monitoring app that does not require daily recordings, yet is accurate and effective for avoiding or achieving pregnancy, would be beneficial. There is an app from Georgetown University’s Institute of Reproductive Health (IRH) using the Two Day method. This app provides a fixed-day calendar system (i.e., days 8 through 19 are considered fertile) and is only intended for women with menstrual cycle lengths of 26 through 32 days in length. Due to this limit, IRH researchers set out to develop a simple fertility monitoring app called the Dynamic Optimal Timing (or DOT app) that only requires the woman to record the first day of her menses every menstrual cycle (Li et al. 2016). The app is based on day-specific probabilities of pregnancy and length of the menstrual cycle. The monitor “learns” the cycle lengths and provides the user with a daily percentage of the probability of pregnancy. The DOT app was developed by use of three available data sets of menstrual cycles from three past studies, i.e., the North Carolina study (N = 68 participants and 171 menstrual cycles of data), the Early Pregnancy Study (N = 221participants and 696 cycles of data), and the World Health Organization study of the ovulation method (N = 706 participants and 8118 cycles of data). The North Carolina study and the Early Pregnancy Study was based on