A smart ring designed exclusively for women will do what no husband would ever dream of – tell them how to snap out of their mood. The Evie ring will monitor the wearer's menstrual cycles, sleep patterns, and other vital statistics in a bid to help her'learn how to feel her best'. Rather than provide the data in complex graphs and charts, the results will instead be simplified into'actionable insights' for the user to change their lifestyle. The Californian-based firm behind the smart ring, Movano, is aiming for it to become the first wearable to also be approved as a medical device. The Evie ring will monitor the wearer's menstrual cycles, sleep patterns, and other vital statistics in a bid to help her'learn how to feel her best' Alongside monitoring heart rate, respiration rate, and skin temperature, the ring will also track users' ovulation, periods, and menstrual symptoms.

Competition for mates between prehistoric human women may have contributed to'concealed ovulation' – a lack of any notable physical clues that a woman is fertile, experts say. Using computational models, US researchers found evidence that concealed ovulation in humans – which is unusual in the animal kingdom – evolved to allow women to hide their fertility status from other females. This would have helped avoid female conflict, perhaps driven by aggression towards potential rivals for male mates. Previously, scientists have thought women evolved to conceal ovulation from males to encourage them to help with looking after children. The new research shows that the origin of concealed ovulation might have actually have been much more female-oriented than previously thought. 'The study of human evolution has tended to look at things from a male perspective,' said senior study author Athena Aktipis, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University in the US.

More than 50 women in Sweden who said they used the Natural Cycles app as contraception ended up pregnant and reported their cases to the Medical Product Agency, according to a statement from Natural Cycles. The app, a certified contraceptive in Europe, has about the same failure rates as the pill, but only under certain circumstances, according to experts. "Natural methods, when used correctly, are very very effective," Richard J. Fehring, professor, and director of the Marquette University College of Nursing Institute for Natural Family Planning, told International Business Times. The Natural Cycles app uses an algorithm to calculate the days a woman is fertile and therefore most likely to get pregnant and when used properly, it claims to be about as effective as the pill. The app requires that users take their temperature each morning and input it into the app, then after some calculations, the app says whether users are "not fertile," or should "use protection."

The way it does this is by tracking the levels of luteinizing hormone in your pee. It's the same method that those drugstore fertility monitors use to figure out if you're ovulating, but the difference with the Mira is that it keeps track of that information so that you don't have to do it. You pee on the one-time-use Mira fertility wand, stick it into the egg-shaped digital reader, and voila, you'll see if you're ovulating in the tiny digital screen. It'll also send that information over to a companion app via Bluetooth. Apparently Mira uses a different kind of fertility wand than its drugstore counterpart -- it uses a fluorescent immunoassay that actually tells you the quantity of LH in your urine.

One of the problems with over-the-counter fertility monitors is that they don't often tell you much beyond if you happen to be ovulating at the time you're taking the test. If you are, there's a smiley face, and if you're not, there's nothing. The Mira fertility monitor, however, is a little different. It has an AI so that it learns your patterns over time, and will figure out when you're ovulating potentially weeks before it happens. The way it does this is by tracking the levels of luteinizing hormone in your pee.