Having babies faster with Big Data

A new application for iPhone and iPad, Ovuline’s Smart Fertility, uses machine learning techniques and big data to help women to become pregnant.

There are many smartphone apps that let women track their menstrual cycle. But the app from Ovuline company, a startup based in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), founded in 2012, is unlike any other in the use of massive data analysis to predict the best time to conceive.

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According to CEO, Paris Wallace, "One of the big reasons why women take, on average, 4 to 6 months to conceive is because they are not accurately predicting ovulation. Of our users who have reported pregnancy, they're doing so in about 60 days, which is about 3 times faster than the national average [of US]. So our algorithm and prediction engine seems to be working."

Ovuline app can be used by any woman, but seems to be especially attractive to couples who wait until their 30s or 40s to have children. "When they want to have a child,", says Wallace, "they want to get pregnant immediately. And then when it doesn't work over the course of a few weeks or a few months, they turn to Ovuline to help them conceive."

The numbers 

In the world of clinical decision support, one of the main obstacles to getting good reliable diagnostic and predictive tools with generalization power is to have a high enough volume of cases. The people behind Ovuline seem to have found a simple formula to get them: The app is totally free. "We really want to have as many consumers as possible sign up for our service and use it, obviously, because the more data we get, the better our service becomes, and the better our predictions are using our machine learning algorithms".

Thus, at the time of writing Ovuline already has over 5 million data records of more than 80,000 women. The information collected is from data on blood pressure, weight, cervical fluids, menstrual cycle, body temperature, and even sexual intercourse. To collect such data, they do not only use the app for iPhone, but also wearable quantified self devices for self-monitoring.

With the rapid growth of the volume of data they are experiencing, Ovuline is already developing other health applications. In autumn they will launch a system to monitor the pregnancy. "Women will enter information, and we'll also collect (data) on the quantified self devices."

Via:
[informationweek]