Digital contraceptives and fertility awareness products are currently offered
as convenient smartphone applications. The first legitimate contraceptive
smartphone app was recently introduced on the European market, with the
digital processing based on measurements of the female user’s basal body
temperature (BBT). According to ...
Digital contraceptives and fertility awareness products are currently offered
as convenient smartphone applications. The first legitimate contraceptive
smartphone app was recently introduced on the European market, with the
digital processing based on measurements of the female user’s basal body
temperature (BBT). According to recent pilot market data, at some Swedish
hospitals, up to 5−10% of women seeking abortion had become involuntarily
pregnant while using the product. This fact motivates a review of the research on fertility determination based on BBT measurements. This paper
provides the first estimation theoretical review and evaluation of BBT-based
ovulation detection. From an engineering perspective, it is concluded that
the available detection algorithms have similar performance and that the
performance is rather insensitive to a one- or two-decimal resolution of the
employed thermometer. Further, we highlight that when using the output
from proposed ovulation detection algorithms, one must consider not only
the uncertainty in the relative time difference of the detected temperature
shift and the ovulation, but also the statistical uncertainty of the detection
methods due to noisy measurements.
