STOCKHOLM--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NaturalCycles, the data analytics company innovating the basics, launches the world’s only birth control app.
Women don’t always make an informed decision when choosing their contraception. 63 percent say they know little or nothing about birth control pills and much of what they think they know, is in fact wrong1. NaturalCycles wants to ensure that every woman loves her birth control by bridging that knowledge gap and offering access to their 99.9% safe2, 100% natural alternative.
Virtually all women of reproductive age have used at least one contraceptive method at some point. Amongst these women, nearly 40 percent say they are not completely satisfied with their current birth-control method3. And in the increasingly health conscious world that we live in, this proportion of women is destined to grow.
“Mobile is the most transformative trend for healthcare in recent years” said Raoul Scherwitzl, CEO and Co-Founder of NaturalCycles. “We wanted to use today’s ubiquitous access to the Internet, through smartphones and laptops to improve the ability of women to pinpoint their fertility with 99.9% accuracy. The future of birth control lies in knowing your body rather than altering it with hormonal contraceptives, and we are excited to be leading the way.’
NaturalCycles is a Swiss-Scandinavian company that has involved experts in Women’s and Children’s Health, Obstetrics and Gynaecology including from the Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital in the development of its tried and tested app - now available from the iTunes App Store and Google Play, worldwide.
NaturalCycles aims to give women in a relationship the freedom to enjoy sex without worry, promoting the use of condoms only when it is absolutely necessary. With NaturalCycles’ clean look and three-step method, predicting your fertile window is straightforward and stress-free. NaturalCycles is versatile, allowing you to immediately switch from pregnancy avoidance to pregnancy planning, and vice versa.
“I left my career at CERN to make the NaturalCycles algorithm with the hope of making it available for all couples, not just for ourselves.” says Elina Berglund, CTO and Co-Founder of NaturalCycles. “Other Natural Family Planning products are difficult to use, old-fashioned and inaccurate.”
When Elina & Raoul, the husband and wife co-founders were ready to plan their first child, they tweeted that they were trying with NaturalCycles and it worked like a charm. Now the parents of a 5 month old daughter, they are back using NaturalCycles for prevention. “NaturalCycles gets to know each user’s unique cycle. The more data you enter, the more green ‘good to go’ days you get back. It’s fun and makes everyday life easier to plan.”
NaturalCycles is a values-based company dedicated to improving the health and well-being of women and families around the world. Unwanted pregnancies are still a challenge to society. In the US and the UK almost half of all pregnancies were unplanned*4,5,6.
*of which 29% were ambivalent in the UK.
Notes to Editors:
About NaturalCycles
NaturalCycles was founded by husband and wife, Elina Berglund and Raoul Scherwitzl. With PhD’s in physics, they applied their mathematical techniques to developing the NaturalCycles algorithm in order to find a healthy way to prevent and plan pregnancy. Elina was a researcher at CERN and was one of the physicists that discovered the Higgs Boson, which lead to the Nobel Prize in 2013. NaturalCycles was originally founded in Switzerland in June 2013 and has offices in both Zurich and Stockholm. NaturalCycles was recently announced as “Sweden’s hottest start-up” and will compete internationally against nineteen other start-ups at the leWeb’14, Paris this coming December. More information about NaturalCycles is available at: www.naturalcycles.com and on Twitter @NaturalCyclesNC
References
1. Barriers to Effective Contraceptive Use - Available at: http://www.populationconnection.org/site/DocServer/2012_Barriers.pdf?docID=4132 [Last accessed October 16, 2014)
2. Berglund Scherwitzl, E. et al (2014). Identification and Prediction of the Fertile Window by NaturalCycles. [In press - European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Health Care]
3. Frost JJ, Darroch JE and Remez L (2008). Improving contraceptive use in the United States, In Brief, New York: Guttmacher Institute, No. 1.
4. Hatcher RA, et al (2011).Contraceptive Technology. 20th ed. New York: Irvington
5. Trussell, J. et al (2009). Cost effectiveness of contraceptives in the United States. Contraception 79 (1): 5–14.
6. Wellings, K. et al (2013). The prevalence of unplanned pregnancy and associated factors in Britain: Findings from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3)". The Lancet 382 (9907): 1807
