Over 200,000 Women Have Used Their Smartphones To Help Them Get Pregnant

Expecting pregnant

Want to get pregnant? Avoid getting pregnant? There’s an app for that – actually multiple apps, some of them with amazing track records.

And now one of them is turning your iPhone into a data collection device that helps monitor fertility – known as an oral fertility thermometer.

Perhaps the best-known fertility app in the tech world is Glow, founded by PayPal mafia member Max Levchin.

Glow recently made news when the just-over-a-year-old startup announced it had raised $17 million in venture investment and now employs 22 people. It says it has already helped 25,000 women get pregnant.

But that’s nothing compared to the track record claimed by fertility app competitor Ovuline, which launched it’s app, Ovia before Glow, in June, 2012.

Ovia has now been downloaded about 1 million times, and has helped about 175,000 women get pregnant, according to recent stats the company shared with Business Insider

Ovia is currently helping women get pregnant at a rate of over 20,000 a month, it says. These stats come from when users of the app report pregnancies.

Some of these apps continue to be helpful during pregency, too. For instance, Ovia can alert a woman if things are normal or not. For instance, it can suggest she get tested for anemia if she reports feeling really tired. It also collects data from a bunch of other fitness devices like Fitbit, the Aria smart scale, or the Withings blood pressure monitor. And Glow offers Glow Nurture, which helps pregnant women track their health, too.

But these apps are beginning to do even more to turn your smartphone into a birth control device.

Fertility app maker Kindara has gone to the next step. Instead of asking women to manually enter data an app, it is about to launch a basal body temperature thermometer called Wink, which automatically links with the phone and the app.

A rise in a woman’s basal temp, taken when she wakes up in the morning, indicates the time is right to start a family … or to avoid starting one.

Wink is expected to ship in Spring 2015 for about $129, though women can pre-order it now for $79.

Here’s a video that shows Wink in action.