Читать книгу Dad's Guide to Pregnancy For Dummies - Sharon Perkins - Страница 49

If you need one more reason to play with your smartphone, or if you’re the type that lives to organize data, using a fertility app can make getting pregnant more fun and sometimes a bit easier. Yes, you could do much the same with a diary or written calendar, but if you have an app on your phone, you’ll always be able to find it. A few even have a place for dad-to-be data, to help spot possible issues.

Fertility apps, which can range in price from free to up to $100 a year, can make the baby journey easier by tracking

 Your partner’s normal cycle schedule

 When ovulation is most likely to occur, based on her cycles

 Symptoms that indicate ovulation is imminent

 Premenstrual symptoms, including mood changes

Some apps go a lot further — and cost a whole lot more — by synching the app data with monitors they sell to track your temperature, saliva, or cervical mucus. These can get quite pricy.

If you want to determine when ovulation occurs in a less techy way, you can use ovulation prediction kits, which measure the amount of LH in your partner’s urine to determine when ovulation is about to occur. These tests can work well if your partner has regular cycles and a good idea of when she usually ovulates, but may not work at all for women with PCOS, who often have abnormally high LH levels. (For more on this, see “Polycystic ovary syndrome,” later in this chapter.) They can also get pretty expensive if your partner has irregular cycles and no idea when she’s going to ovulate. You can go through a lot of expensive strips in this case.