Birth control app highlights emerging health tech market

LONDON — The condom, the pill and now, the smartphone?

Natural Cycles, a mobile fertility app, this month became the first ever digital contraceptive device to win Food and Drug Administration marketing approval. Women take their temperatures and track their menstrual cycle on the app, which uses an algorithm to determine when they’re fertile and should abstain from unprotected sex or use protection. In effect, it’s a form of the rhythm or calendar method.

The Swedish startup says it’s effective and lets women avoid side effects common with other methods like birth control pills. But reports of unwanted pregnancies and investigations by authorities in two countries in Europe have raised questions about marketing what is essentially a health monitor as a contraceptive.

Natural Cycles boasts more than 900,000 users, and such fast growth underscores risks for regulators as they grapple with the rapidly emerging market for mobile and digital health applications.

“Apps are incredibly popular, and there’s nothing inherently wrong about using tech to support our health,” said Bekki Burbidge, deputy chief executive of the Family Planning Association, a British sexual health organization. “But they’re also an area that is fairly unregulated and it can be hard to sort the good, evidence- and research-based apps from the bad.”

FDA approval means it can be marketed as a mobile contraceptive, giving it an edge in the medical apps market, which is forecast to grow to $11.2 billion by 2025, up from at $1.4 billion in 2016, according to BIS Research. The makers of Natural Cycles acknowledge some women might still get pregnant even if the app is used perfectly.

The FDA gave its approval based on data from Natural Cycles involving 15,570 women who used the app for an average of eight months. The FDA said that if the app is used correctly all the time, 1.8 percent of women would get pregnant over one year. The “typical use” failure rate, which factors in human error, was 6.5 percent.

The birth control pill’s failure rate is 9 percent, while for condoms it’s 18 percent and 24 percent for fertility-awareness methods , but those figures are backed up by much more long-term data.