The Ava Fertility Tracker wristband and mobile app combination is adding pregnancy monitoring features to the mobile app. We originally wrote about Ava in July 2016. Ava’s accuracy in detecting the 5.3 most fertile days of a woman’s cycle was recently verified by a clinical study published in Nature (see related news, below). Unlike fertility tracking methods that monitor basal body temperature alone, Ava tracks temperature, resting pulse rate, sleep, bioimpedance, and heart rate variability.
The new app features, available to Ava users on June 1, 2017, will provide week-by-week information about changes for the mother and baby during pregnancy. The pregnancy monitoring feature also will report information about sleep quality and quantity, physiological stress, resting pulse rate, skin temperature, and weight. According to Ava Science co-founder and CEO Lea von Bidder, there have been “more than 50 confirmed pregnancies to date among Ava users.” The company added the pregnancy monitoring feature to the app to help women continue to monitor sleep and physiological stress during pregnancy.
In separate, but related news, Ava devices were used in a clinical study that determined median pulse rate measured through wrist-worn sensors strongly correlates with the different phases of the menstrual cycle. The study, published in Scientific Reports, was led by researchers at University Hospital of Zurich. The study employed photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor wristbands including Ava, PulseOn, and Basis Science’s Basis Peak. Ava and PulseOn use 2-wavelength optical PPG sensors. Basis Peak had a 1-wavelength PPG sensor. (Note, Basis Peak has been recalled and withdrawn from the market because of heating issues.)
