Your smart phone can help you get pregnant
The sound of a lullaby is music all people wanting to be parents hope to hear. And it's the ring tone alert you will hear when using Apple's In Vitro App called "IVF-Baby in the Making." Mom and designer Kim Konopa was motivated to design an In Vitro app because she knew the pain of trying to become pregnant. "It was actually a personal experience with In Vitro Fertilization and I just thought the need was there," she says. Konopa decided to put her organization skills to work. She did her homework and found a software developer to work with her and her 22-year-old son, JR, who is one of her partners. She explains how it works. "The main component is the calendar and, because you're taking so many medications and making so many appointments, we've pre-loaded those into the iPhone app so it's very simple to use. So, let's say you have a doctor's visit. You can put the location in. Let's say you're going to add a medication, you do the same thing. You choose from a pre-populated list of all the medications they could give you." Because women often feel so alone going through In Vitro, Konopa has that covered too. "We built in a blog so that people can kind of get together and share their experiences. We also built in a resources section, things like how to inject, which I was naive about too at the time," she says. Because In Vitro isn't cheap and not always covered by insurance, the application is also practical. "It has a budget tracker, which allows you to easily enter your invoices so when you enter them it keeps track of the remaining budget and then it just keeps a running balance," Konopa points out. You can also personalize your app. In the three months Apple has offered the In Vitro App, Konopa says the response has been steady in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Japan. Konopa says becoming a mother is the best thing that happened to her and she's hoping her app may give other women the same experience. "I love it. It allows me somewhere to put my energy that's extremely positive and hopefully it helps other become successful in their journey to become pregnant," she says. Konopa also consulted with her own reproductive endocrinologist while working on the In Vitro app.
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