Rebecca Simmons, MPH, a senior research officer at IRH, said the researchers want to test how effective the app is as a method to avoid pregnancy in a real-time situation. Dr. Duane believes that women need to use fertility awareness methods for monitoring their pregnancy or simply know if they are pregnant or not.
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Dr. Marguerite Duane, lead author of the study and researcher with Georgetown University School of Medicine, noted that fertility apps are becoming hugely popular as more and more women seek to have a tighter control over their pregnancy.
But as the authors write, “The effectiveness of fertility awareness based methods (FABMs) depends on women observing and recording fertility biomarkers and following evidence-based guidelines”.
The Congress of Gynecologists and Obstetricians says that the most fertile time for a woman to get pregnant occurs during the menstrual cycle.
Lead researcher Dr. Marguerite Duane, of Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and colleagues came to their conclusion after conducting a review of nearly 100 fertility apps.
Surprisingly, 55 of the apps failed to use an evidence-based FABM to track information making them void of any use and eliminated from the study leading to a worry that many women are depending on these apps to correctly predict their fertility.
Other apps monitor women’s basal body temperature (BBT) when they are resting. The available apps vary, but majority help women track their menstrual cycle, helping to predict when they are ovulating and therefore most likely to become pregnant.
Several apps help women keep an eye on their fertility by tracking changes in their cervical mucus.
The researchers discovered 95 fertility-related applications on iTunes, Google, and Google Play, places where smartphone users go to download their apps.
Out of the total number of apps, researchers excluded the ones that contained a disclaimer stating that they are not to be used as a pregnancy prevention method.
Researchers were left with just 40 apps to analyze. These apps have different potential to evaluate pregnancies. Using a rating system employed by the Family Practice Management, the researchers rated each app on a five-point scale for 10 criteria considered to be important for avoiding pregnancy. The researchers concluded in a statement that, although fertility apps offer “a convenient way to track fertility biomarkers”, unfortunately, “only some employ evidence-based FABMs”. On the other hand, apps that did not predicted the fertility days of its users scored high on accuracy if it required its users to undergo training in an FABM before use.
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She advised women who wish to take effectively benefit from smartphone apps to learn from a trained educator before looking for an app that reached four or more on mean accuracy and authority in her team’s review.
