New Wearable Device Claims To Improve Couples' Chances To Conceive

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PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - Many people are turning to smartwatches and other wearable devices for help with everything from counting calories to simply staying organized.

Now, there's one that can help couples get pregnant.

Baby Emmy is 4 months old and was one of the first babies born using Ava, which is also known as the Fitbit for fertility.

It's a fertility tracking bracelet that claims to be clinically proven to detect a woman's five-day ovulation window with nearly 90 percent accuracy in real-time.

Ava says it doubles a couple's chances of conceiving in a given month.

"I'm 30 so I feel like as you get older as a woman there's a little more pressure, you don't know if you're going to be able to get pregnant as easy - so using the Ava bracelet just took a lot of stress and pressure off myself that I could understand my body better," Jade Tolbert said.

For about five months, newlyweds Jade and her husband, Tanner, from the TV show "Bachelor in Paradise" tried to conceive with no luck.

"I was using an ovulation calendar to try and kind of figure out my cycle, but there's not a lot of information out there so we were just kind of winging it I feel like," Jade said.

Within the second month of using Ava, which is supposed to be worn at night and is designed for healthy women, Jade got pregnant.

"I think it's just a real game-changer for the whole industry of women's health. We have really been used to having methods that are really unreliable, that are not fun to use at all and I think now we're in the 21st century and we really needed something that is easier for women when they're trying to track their cycle and when they're trying to get pregnant," Ava founder and CEO Lea von Bidder said.

Ava's sensors collect data on nine parameters including, resting pulse rate, skin temperature and breathing.

A clinical study published in Scientific Reports and conducted in Zurich backs up the company's claims that resting pulse rate during a woman's fertile window does increase.

"After ovulation, if conception had happened all your rates go up. They don't drop down," Ava user Gabrielle San Antonio said.

San Antonio got pregnant within the first month of using Ava.

The company says there have been about 1,000 pregnancies since its launch in August of last year.

"It looks like it's probably about as accurate as a urine predictor stick, which a lot of women are familiar with and have used. So, I think it's just yet another tool that women might find appealing," reproductive endocrinology and fertility expert Dr. Heather Huddleston said. "With some of the research that has been done, it is pretty clear that there is differences in heart rate that happen at different times in the cycle and that's really being driven by the levels of hormones that are occurring during those phases of the cycle."

Ava has raised more than $12 million in funding and is part of a booming fertility tech industry.

For example, Wink is an oral fertility thermometer built to sync with the app Kindara via Bluetooth.

Yono is an earbud thermometer that's worn at night to monitor hormones and fertility cycles.
It tracks body temperature and syncs to its app.

"Our vision really is that women will wear Ava for 20, 30, 40 years of their life and Ava will be with them through all of those stages and help them with individual challenges that they have," von Bidder said.

"I do feel like now that I've had a baby, how hard is it for me to get pregnant again, cause your body changes so it's just nice to have the scientific data that I can have look at and be like this is how my body is right now - the knowledge just makes you feel more secure," Jade said.