“There’s an app for that” has become a catchphrase of this new century!
The exponential growth of these useful little bits of software downloaded to our phones is illustrated by the fact that in 2008 the Apple App Store opened with 500 apps, by 2017 that had grown to 2,100,000! Google Play offers an astonishing 2,800,0000 apps!
Obviously, with nearly five million apps to choose from there is bound to be something for the potential father-to-be. In particular, bearing in mind that paternal age is increasing and male fertility is decreasing, the advantages of apps that can track sperm viability are compelling.
So what advantages are we talking about?
Up until recently, sperm testing has been time-consuming, expensive (up to US$1,500) and not to mention awkward. That changed in 2016 with the advent of home testing kits. These are mostly of the postal service variety via a diagnostic clinic, so do not save much time but do have the advantage of providing a personalized report, and are cheaper than the cost of attending clinics for diagnostic tests. Obviously, it goes without saying that these services also eliminate some of the awkwardness that some males experience in this situation.
Around about this time, the app developers started to take notice and men were soon able to say to each other, “There’s an app for that!”
In fact, there are two apps in particular, Yo and Trak. Trak works via a kit that consists of a tiny centrifuge and measuring gauge. Yo is essentially a microscope attachment for your smart phone. In both cases the hardware is supported by apps, which in Yo’s case directly analyses and provides a range of motile sperm concentration. The tests are cheap, quick and convenient.
So what’s the catch?
The main problem is that none of these home tests offer much more than a drugstore test, which measures sperm concentration and leaves out other important parameters of sperm viability. So it is possible for the tests to indicate an optimal sperm concentration but provide no information about other potential problems, such as dead or structurally defective sperm.
The answer to this issue is to build on these pioneering initial apps and increase the range of diagnostic parameters than can be investigated quickly and cheaply but still in the privacy of one’s home!
A team at Harvard University in the US are currently looking at such an app/mobile device enabled solution. They are developing a microchip reader, which attaches to a smart phone and reads a chip with the semen sample. The app then tests the sperm using a computer-learning algorithm. The team has tested their device on 350 patients and found the system can identify negative results with 98% precision.
Professor Hadi Shafiee, the lead developer at Harvard Medical School said, “You can have a lot of sperm cells, but a lot of them can be dead or morphologically defective. That’s why we started thinking about systems for measuring motility.”
In addition to sperm concentration, motile concentration and motility, the system is also able to test for sperm morphology, DNA fragmentation, and other sperm viability issues that can cause infertility, birth defects, and other challenges.
Professor Shafiee estimates that the FDA will approve his test within the next year now that his team is confident in the efficacy of the technology. He sees his goal as not to eliminate clinics and the expertise they offer, but to reduce the awkwardness that some males feel and make testing easier for them. In fact, his idea is that the more complex features of the app will be made available to clinics so that data can be sent directly by patients from their phones to their doctors an expert opinion on the data.
So, gentlemen no excuses, “There’s an app for that!”
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