Fertility app 'Glow' introduced earlier this year by PayPay co-founder Max Levchin, just announced its first partner. On Thursday, the startup said it was teaming up with top health and wellness app MyFitnessPal to enable users to connect their accounts on the two services.
Launched in August with $6 million from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz and others, Glow uses big data analytics to help women who are trying to conceive identify the most fertile days in their cycle. It prompts them to provide information, like the length of their menstrual cycles, basal body temperature and health-related habits, and then analyzes the data within the context of other user data and known medical correlations to predict when she’s most likely to conceive.
As part of the integration with MyFitnessPal, Glow will now automatically pull information about users’ body mass index (BMI) directly into the app, as well as provide users with more specific diet and exercise insights and recommendations.
“We hope to further personalize the woman’s fertility window with the BMI information from MyFitnessPal,” co-founder and CEO Mike Huang said in an email. Not only does body mass index (BMI) affect conception, he said it will be helpful to include nutritional data in Glow’s data processing and algorithms.
“There also hasn’t ever been a cohesive study done to see how food intake affects fertility,” he said. “We know that certain foods should be avoided (like fish & caffeine), but down the line the integration will help us see how diet and exercise can impact a woman’s fertility.”
Article: 18th October 2013 www.gigaom.com