The Quantified Ovary

On this week's show, Arielle Pardes charts Silicon Valley's growing fascination with technology for enabling women to track their fertility.

In recent years, women have increasingly turned to personal technology to provide insight into their own fertility. The women’s health market is awash with wristbands, sleep tracking devices, and sensor-laden wearables that can track the myriad factors that indicate imminent ovulation. These technological solutions can not only help women trying to get pregnant, but also those who may want to get pregnant later in life and want to measure their ovarian reserve. Of course, there’s still a great deal of guesswork involved in all of these tests, devices, and apps. But that hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs from diving into fertility tech with gusto. Arielle Pardes charts Silicon Valley’s infatuation with fertility, including a startup that now offers an at-home testing kit that makes checking one’s reproductive health as simple as submitting a 23andMe gene sample.

Some notes: Read Arielle’s story on Silicon Valley’s dive into fertility tech. Here’s the test kit from Modern Fertility. Lauren is out this week, but will be back next week to talk about Apple. Recommendations this week: Arielle wants you to hear the latest episode of This American Life. Mike wants you to hear PSB’s new M4U 8 headphones.

Send the hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds. Arielle Pardes is @pardesoteric, Lauren Goode is @laurengoode, and Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our theme song is by Solar Keys.

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Play Music app just by tapping here. You can also download an app like Pocket Casts or Radio Public, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

We’re also on Soundcloud, and every episode gets posted to wired.com as soon as it’s released. If you still can’t figure it out, or there’s another platform you use that we’re not on, let us know.