Digital contraceptives based on basal body temperature measurements

Abstract

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.