It’s Tough Being the First Birth Control App By Esmé E Deprez

Natural Cycles is a fertility-tracking app the couple had built five years earlier. It’s also the first, and still the only, mobile application cleared for marketing as a certified contraceptive in Europe. For those who must or wish to abstain from hormonal contraception and its accompanying side effects, Natural Cycles provides a powerful alternative. The app applies a clinically proven algorithm to predict the roughly one week per month during which a woman is fertile. Natural Cycles isn’t one-size-fits-all. Users for whom getting pregnant would be a catastrophe are better served by something such as an IUD. The app is far from effortless to use correctly. It’s crucial to remember to take your temperature at roughly the same time most mornings and before doing anything else. Irregular sleep patterns, illness, travel, and substance use can yield more red days that require abstinence or condom use..

Natural Cycles has been expanding its suite of services, including longer-term fertility predictions, so users can plan a honeymoon or vacation, and it recently concluded a pilot program in Sweden to help women trying to get pregnant determine when to seek help from a fertility clinic. A new mode available on the app, which helps users monitor a pregnancy, could be enhanced to detect signs of a miscarriage, Berglund says.