Prima-temp

When couples want to have a child, the woman sometimes has difficulty getting pregnant. One of the common approaches to improving the odds of conceiving is to track the woman’s body temperature, with the idea that this can indicate when ovulation occurs. There are several limitations to this approach, however. The standard practice is to take a resting temperature first thing when you wake up in the morning; any activity can throw off the subtle differences. Also, this only creates a single data point for the day, and a variety of factors might cause fluctuations that may not be detected by a once-a-day measurement.

The people at Prima-Temp have come up with a different solution, which they showed for the first time at CES 2015. The BLOOM sensor is a device that a woman wears internally, and that can wirelessly report her body temperature around the clock. It can detect changes that occur while the subject is asleep. The more granular data can detect subtle changes that can occur immediately prior to ovulation, rather than the larger temperature rise that characteristically occurs after the fact. The data is sent to a smartphone via a Bluetooth connection, where an app analyzes the information, and is able to send the user an alert when ovulation occurs. According to Prima-Temp, an internal sensor provides more accurate core temperature measurements than sensors applied to the skin.

The BLOOM is scheduled to ship this summer as an over-the-counter consumer device, with a price under $200. The company intends to start with direct sales, and then expand into retail distribution.