Wearable technology tracks our steps, tracks our sleep and now it can even track a woman's best chances of getting pregnant.
More couples are using fertility trackers to try and conceive and fertility specialists believe they may play a critical role in a woman's struggle to get pregnant.
26-year-old Alyssa Fox of Fort Worth is hoping her Ava bracelet will help her conceive.
She's been married for four years and starting a family was the natural next step.
"Everybody always tells you when you're younger, 'oh, you can get pregnant at anytime,' or, 'the second you get off birth control, you can get pregnant,' so I was really shocked when that wasn't me!" said Fox.
She and her husband have been trying to have a baby since April of 2017 and she got her fertility tracking bracelet in February.
Meant to be worn while sleeping, it monitors nine different physiological parameters, including skin temperature, resting pulse rate, breathing rate, heart rate and sleep, then charts it all on an app, so that Fox can see the window when her body is ovulating.
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"You just have to put it on, sleep with it and it tells you when you're fertile, so it's really, really easy to use."
How accurate are they?
According to the company's site, Ava was found to identify an average of 5.3 fertile days per cycle with an accuracy of 89 percent in a year-long clinical study at the University Hospital of Zurich.
Plano fertility specialist Dr Rebecca Chilvers said she hasn't recommended an ovulation wearable to any of her patients yet, and while the bracelet does track parameters related to pregnancy, tried and true ovulation tracking products like LH predictor kits are still the go-to.
However, she believes wearable technology will play an essential role as a first step for women struggling to conceive.
"I think it is a good place to start if someone is young and doesn't have known fertility issues or known gynecologic problems and they just want to get more in tune with themselves and have some data before they come see me," says Dr. Chilvers.
While Fox hasn't gotten pregnant yet, she said the wearable has equipped her with valuable information on her health.
"I learned I wasn't sleeping well. I was stressed. My ovulation was a lot different than what was I was thinking, so it's taught me a lot about my fertility and my lifestyle and how I've been sleeping, my overall health," she said.
She hopes the insight results into a successful pregnancy.
