This Bluetooth-Enabled Temperature Tracker Will Tell You The Optimal Time For Baby-Making

#GNN - Husband and wife team Anna Mayer and Daniel Graf were both professionals in their early 30’s when they decided they wanted to start a family.

However, that proved a lot more difficult than they thought it would be. So mountains of research, visits to experts and some trial and error later, they decided to apply their experience to technology, and Ovatemp, a fertility tracking app, was born.

Mayer credits the methods applied on the app to helping her also produce a healthy baby boy earlier this year.

Ovatemp is now launching ONDO, a digital thermometer to monitor the start of ovulation. The idea is that a woman’s fertility cycle is able to be measured based on her body temperature throughout the month. The thermometer builds on the Ovatemp platform by taking the guess work out of manually checking that basal body temperature.

It works by simply sticking the thermometer under your tongue. It then sends temperature information via Bluetooth to your iPhone and integrates with Apple’s HealthKit.

The Ovatemp app is similar to Glow’s fertility tracker app. Women jot down their cycle, mood, nutrition and other factors. Both also offer a community of support for those trying to conceive. The difference is that Ovatemp is based on methods from traditional Chinese medicine and the FAM method, whereas Glow does not seem to claim a particular method.

“It was the FAM method that finally allowed us to conceive naturally and we’ve built Ovatemp and ONDO from the ground up based on FAM’s principles to make it easier for women to follow, track and conceive naturally with digital tools,” said Mayer.

Ovatemp co-founders say ONDO is actually a uniting technology for both Ovatemp and Glow. Both aim to help prevent or promote pregnancy through natural means and both track basal body tempearature via the app. According to Ovatemp, the ONDO digital thermometer can also integrate with both Glow’s fertility platform for additional information on a woman’s ovulation cycle.

The ONDO is available for purchase on the Ovatemp website, Amazon and Walgreens starting today. The ONDO device goes for $149. The app is free.

How Apple’s #HealthKit Could Offer General Wellbeing As A Platform Advantage

#GNN - #Apple’s HealthKit is coming in iOS 8, and while reports about the current beta version of the software paint it mostly as an empty vessel waiting for developers to build hooks that connect their data to the hub, and use the data volunteered by other apps and the user to inform their own health and fitness software. But Apple isn’t just waiting to see what people will build; behind the scenes, it has been having discussions with Mount Sinai, The Cleveland Clinic, John Hopkins and EHR provider Allscripts, according to a new report by Reuters.

These are in addition to partners Apple had previously revealed for the platform, including the Mayo Clinic and EHR software-maker Epic. But the expansive nature of Apple’s discussions with top health care providers suggest that the company is serious about filling HealthKit not just with made-up health metrics like ‘NikeFuel’ or steps that give a general indicator of one facet of fitness but don’t really act as a medical measure.

Apple’s desire to bring on partners that include medical professionals and institutions (many of which are already using iPads anyway) could present it with some considerable challenges: The more comprehensive the iPad becomes as a medical device, the more it becomes subject to government regulations and safety nets put in place to protect customer and patient data. There’s HIPAA compliance, which will likely be required if Apple’s HealthKit stores any real medical records and makes that available to other apps, for instance.

These hurdles make it hard for startups to innovate in healthcare-related software and services, but Apple has advantages when it comes to finding its way through the thorny maze that is healthcare regulation, because of its influence on Capitol Hill and the size of its available resource pool – including its more than $160 billion in cash reserves.

HealthKit itself is likely designed specifically with lessening Apple’s risk in terms of regulatory matters and the involvement of bodies like the FDA, as Apple has reportedly been taking to the FDA to discuss its obligations around HealthKit.

The time and investment required to get HealthKit ready and able to support genuine medical use is probably great, but the benefit that Apple stands to gain in doing so is greater. Competitors like Google have offered fitness hub-type functionality too (Google Fit), but Apple could be first to market with something that affects a user’s general wellbeing in non-trivial ways. And that’s a market advantage that will have impact far beyond flashy hardware features like a better camera or a bigger screen, in the long run.