No updates yet for the fertility stuff. We are still waiting until January to do anything so I thought this would be a good time to do the review for the Glow Ovulation & Fertility App I had promised earlier. I will include a link to the app at the bottom so if you feel this app will work for you, you can try it out for yourself. I do want to note that Glow has not asked me to do a review and I am also in no way affiliated with Glow and have not and will not be reimbursed in any way for this review.
The Glow Ovulation & Fertility app does have some definite pluses and minuses. Some of the neat features of the app are the ability to track different aspects that are/can be important to fertility. Some of the things that can be tracked are basal body temperature, cervical mucus, cervical position, weight, how much you are sleeping, how you are feeling and the results of an ovulation test (if you take those). This can help with natural family planning and can give some information to your doctor if you are going through treatments. I found that I do not use this feature as much as some people might because the treatment method we are using and the fertility problems I have means that a lot of these things don’t mean a whole lot for me. The app also allows you to keep track of the medications and supplements you are taking and you can set up reminders to take the medications which is nice since a lot of the hormones have to be taken at exactly the same time every day. With the medications you can input the medication, the type (pill, injection, patch, whatever), and the dosage. There is also a community part of the app where you can connect to other women. Not all of them are going through fertility problems, but you can personalize which community boards you see so you can focus on just boards that deal with infertility. One of the things that drew me to the app was the ability to track through your treatment cycle. You can select if you are preparing for treatment, doing timed intercourse, IUI, or IVF. After selecting the treatment type you can pick your start and end dates and put in your doctor and whether you have done any testing and enter your testing results. The amount of personalization that is available in the app is really neat and can be very helpful.
Now for the bad of the app. This biggest issue I’ve found is I just didn’t use it. I may be a bit old school but I really preferred using a day planner and having everything written out. I also found that you can add medications to your cycle, but the prelisted meds can’t be removed. I messaged Glow’s support team and got a very speedy response, which is nice, and they did confirm that the medications that are listed by default cannot be removed from the list. Since every person’s cycle is unique to them I found that this was a bit odd. When I looked through the medication list I found that I was only taking 2 of the medications on the list. To me that means that the list may as well not be there at all. I have also found at this point that there does not seem to be an option to track the transfer cycle, which is kind of an important part of IVF treatment. The app seems to focus more on the retrieval than anything else. The last issue I found with the app is the widget. To me it would make sense to have a widget to easily see your log and add to it, instead the widget is for easier access to the community pages. While some people may find this useful I would rather have easy access to the tracking information since that is why I was looking for a fertility app.
The Glow Ovulation & Fertility app is free with an in app purchase to get the premium version, though it is a monthly fee rather than a one time thing. I don’t think I will continue to use this app, beyond I’m hoping to not have to need it, it just doesn’t seem to meet my needs.
Android App: Glow Ovulation & Fertility
iOS App: Glow Fertility Tracker, Ovulation Tracker App
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