The rise in digital fertility awareness
Non-hormonal approaches to fertility tracking, contraception, or strategies to conceive go by many different names. You may have heard of them as the rhythm method, fertility awareness methods (FAM), or natural family planning.
These methods have been around for decades—and even centuries, if you count the rudimentary versions of these methods used in antiquity. Yet, they’ve waned in popularity as hormonal contraception and fertility treatments have grown in accessibility and accuracy and decreased in stigma.
However, FAM is getting a second life with increases in accuracy and the help of digital tools.
The latest: Ovy App, a German menstrual cycle tracking application, has received Class IIB MDR certification, classifying it as a digital contraceptive device.
- The company advertises its product as a safe, simple, and hormone-free way to manage your reproductive health independently.
- The app relies on typical FAM method approaches—namely, the measurement of daily basal body temperature and cervical mucus observations—paired with a clinically validated algorithm that identifies users’ fertile window and monitors overall gynecological health.
- The app-based algorithmic fertility monitoring is made easier with Ovy’s compatible Bluetooth thermometer, which automatically transmits readings.
Growing acceptance of FAM: The MDR certification, which marks a significant scientific stamp of approval for the FAM world, grows the authority of this approach to reproductive health. The certification process is notoriously stringent in the clinical evidence it requires from applicants.
- Previously, FAM has been mainly associated with religious populations, particularly Catholics, due to the church’s disapproval of hormonal birth control and in vitro fertilization.
- The famous rhythm method has gone out of vogue as more scientific approaches to FAM have taken its place, including the Billings Method, the Creighton Model, and the Symptothermal Method.
- Now, as trends like “hormone balancing” have brought more attention to and demand for hormone awareness products and alternatives to hormonal contraceptives, a tech-forward FAM product is well-positioned for adoption by a new generation.