Your FitBit can now tell you best time of month for you to get pregnant
FitBits could now be used by wannabe mums who are looking for a cheap and reliable way to monitor their cycles
WRISTWATCH-style fitness tracker Fitbit can accurately predict the best time of the month to get pregnant.
The gadget measures heart rate, the amount of exercise taken and sleep patterns.
But by monitoring the resting heart rate, which changes during the menstrual cycle, researchers found that it also shows the best time to conceive.
Comparing the rate with hormone levels found that it rises shortly before ovulation, giving 24-hours’ notice that the most fertile time of the month is approaching.
The findings –presented at Europe’s largest fertility conference in Helsinki, Finland – were confirmed by comparing heart rate with hormone levels in a daily urine sample.
FitBits could now be used by wannabe mums who are looking for a cheap and reliable way to monitor their cycles.
Dr Vedrana Högqvist Tabor, from German medical firm BioWink, monitored the resting heart rate of five women aged 25 to 40, who had regular period cycles of between 25 to 31 days.
She compared their results across ten menstrual cycles with one woman on hormonal birth control and one man, who showed no significant changes in resting heart rate.
Dr Tabor said: “Electronic wearable technology measuring number of daily steps/distances, sleep and parameters such as heart rate can be used to determine different phases of menstrual cycle.”
She added: “This could give a person with a regular cycle 24 hour indication of when the peak fertility is.
“FitBit has quite a nice interface and a good app, where one can see their heart rate throughout the day, and also resting heart rates for the past week and month.
“It's also quite intuitive to use.”
She said FitBit was “superior” to other ovulation monitoring methods, which vary in complexity, and may require women to record data, which is easy to forget.
The findings are only the pilot stage of a large-scale study that will examine resting heart rates in women of different ages and with varying lifestyles.
Women’s bodies change as a result of the menstrual cycle, leading to fluctuations in water retention, weight, metabolism, flexibility, temperature and eyesight.
Fertility expert Professor Allan Pacey, from Sheffield University, said there was nothing wrong with monitoring ovulation – but warned women not get too focused on only having sex on “fertile” days.
He said men can suffer “performance anxiety” if their partner puts too much pressure on them to have sex on these days.
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He said: “One of the biggest issues, I think, is men suffering from performance anxiety, or just being turned off, when women are fixated on a time or a date, a day or night which she has decided is the best time to try for a baby.
“There’s no problem with women using data if it helps them better plan things, but you don’t want to undo that benefit by sharing too much of that with him, and risk putting him off.
“You have a disconnection between couples, where the man is told you can’t ejaculate for a fortnight because two weeks on Tuesday, she reckons she is going to ovulate.
“The next thing that happens is he’s at work, all stressed and she sends him a text saying, ‘You’ve got to come home and shag me now’.
“He gets all wound up in the traffic on the way home, he bursts through the door and she’s on him like a panther. It is not conducive to healthy relationships.
“He’s not allowed to have a drink in all this either, so he’s pretty pissed off.
“What I say in all the talks that I give is, ‘Ladies you are far cleverer than that. Plan your evening, but just don’t tell him about it.’
“Get him home. Curry on. Beer. Let him go through the motions of having his belly full, and then jump on him and you’ll get what you want and he won’t know any different.
“This whole fixation on sex frequency, vitamins, ovulation detection and everything that goes with it just causes strain and strife.”
Mr Stuart Lavery, Consultant Gynaecologist and Director of IVF Hammersmith at Hammersmith Hospital, said: “You want to put as less stress on a couple as possible.
“Some of them come into the clinic with Excel spreadsheets on frequency of intercourse and they do lose the romance.
“The amount of stress that it puts on the couples is enormous.
“Sometimes we have to recognise that sometimes our advice can produce more stress and that having intercourse becomes more mechanistic and less fun.
Therefore, you are less likely to do it.”
The company that owns FitBit had no involvement in the study.