Fertility app Glow teams up with MyFitnessPal

Fertility app 'Glow' introduced earlier this year by PayPay co-founder Max Levchin, just announced its first partner. On Thursday, the startup said it was teaming up with top health and wellness app MyFitnessPal to enable users to connect their accounts on the two services. Launched in August with $6 million from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz and others, Glow uses big data analytics to help women who are trying to conceive identify the most fertile days in their cycle. It prompts them to provide information, like the length of their menstrual cycles, basal body temperature and health-related habits, and then analyzes the data within the context of other user data and known medical correlations to predict when she’s most likely to conceive. As part of the integration with MyFitnessPal, Glow will now automatically pull information about users’ body mass index (BMI) directly into the app, as well as provide users with more specific diet and exercise insights and recommendations. “We hope to further personalize the woman’s fertility window with the BMI information from MyFitnessPal,” co-founder and CEO Mike Huang said in an email. Not only does body mass index (BMI) affect conception, he said it will be helpful to include nutritional data in Glow’s data processing and algorithms. “There also hasn’t ever been a cohesive study done to see how food intake affects fertility,” he said. “We know that certain foods should be avoided (like fish & caffeine), but down the line the integration will help us see how diet and exercise can impact a woman’s fertility.” Article: 18th October 2013 www.gigaom.com Read more about timing and ovulation at www.prideangel.com

Glow iphone app aims to help women get pregnant by data processing

A new app from the co-founder of PayPal helps couples achieve a successful pregnancy by notifying them via their smartphones when they are most likely to conceive, and offering handy tips about buying presents and dressing for the occasion. The Glow app processes data entered by a woman trying to become pregnant, including details of her menstrual cycle and body temperature, and produces a colour-coded chart that highlights opportune moments in the month for baby-making. Some may find it odd to take such intimate instructions from their mobile, but billionaire Ukrainian entrepeneur Max Levchin, who co-founded the PayPal digital payment platform in 1998, believes the app gives a novel edge to what can become an "unpleasurable routine" for struggling couples. "Many of the reasons why people find it difficult, when they’re keeping on the clock, is because it becomes unpleasurable when it’s a routine,” he told technology website All Things D. Mr Levchin is a father-of-two who conceived his children without difficulties, but was inspired to create the Glow app after hearing about friends' experiences with IVF. "We have people close to us that have gone through multiple IVF trials," he said, "and we’ve heard them say, ‘We’re not going to put my wife’s body through this anymore.’" In 2011, almost 14,000 British women became pregnant through IVF, as the average age when women give birth in the West continues to rise and couples who struggle with fertility issues are increasingly able to conceive with artificial help. The Glow app is still in development, but when launched will be available for iPhone. Article: 31st May 2013 www.telegraph.co.uk Read more about pregnancy fertility monitors at www.prideangel.com