When you start trying to get pregnant you’ll begin to notice all the products that are available to help with that process. If you’re trying to pick a fertility monitor, you might find yourself wondering what these devices do, and more importantly, how they can help you get pregnant. If you don’t know how they work, you can’t judge whether they’re the right option for you.
Fortunately, today, we’re here to help!
What is Fertility Monitoring?
Fertility is a difficult quality to monitor: there’s no easy to access scale of fertility that tells you if you’re 20% fertile, or 80% fertile on any given day. You have to put together a number of different factors to find out how likely you are to get pregnant. If you want to boost your fertility, you need to find your ‘fertile days’ – the days in each menstrual cycle when sperm can survive for long enough after intercourse to encounter the egg while it’s still fertile.
Fertility monitors tell you when your fertile days are approaching by detecting when you’re going to ovulate, and they do this in one of two ways.
How Do They Monitor Your Fertility?
These two ways are most fertility monitors work. Some measure your hormone levels, looking for the spike in hormones that indicate your body is preparing to ovulate. They do this by testing your urine – you can place a stick in the stream or collect it in a cup depending on what works best for you.
The advantage of this technique is that kits that work like this are relatively cheap and easy to find: you can buy them in any chemist and most supermarkets, and they’re as easy to use as a pregnancy test.
There are downsides, however. If you have any kind of hormone disrupting health condition the results can be distorted, meaning it doesn’t give you an accurate read on when you’re going to be most fertile – if you have PCOS, for example, these tests find it hard to give you an accurate answer.
You can get a more accurate answer by using a fertility monitor that measures your Basal Body Temperature. This isn’t affected by hormone disruption, so while it’s a little more work to get the data you need for this method, it’s well worth putting the effort in. Modern fertility monitors help by recording the information for you and processing it into predictions of when you’ll next be at peak fertility!