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If you’re trying to track your menstrual cycle to figure out when you’re ovulating, the most obvious thing to do is to track your Basal Body Temperature (BBT). But some women don’t experience many changes in their BBT even when they get their period or start to ovulate, or they might not be able to take their temperature at the same time every day – this means the BBT method isn’t foolproof.
Enter YONO, a wearable gadget that wants to make it easier for women to understand their bodies and menstrual cycles. Now, there are a few companies that are already in the same space, including the Ava Bracelet, but YONO’s silicone-encased earpiece is definitely the smallest, sleekest wearable that we’ve seen in the market:
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How do you track your menstrual cycle with YONO?
To track your menstrual cycle, all you need to do is to make sure that you’re wearing YONO while you sleep. The wearable will work to collect hundreds of data points while you sleep, and sync these to the YONO fertility app when you return the earbud to its base station. With the continuous body temperature data that YONO provides, the fertility app can interpret your BBT, and go on to plot a monthly fertility chart to predict your fertility.
How did YONO come about?
YONO is built by Yono Labs, a startup based in Silicon Valley. According to Vanessa Xi, founder and CEO of Yono Labs, YONO was created out of personal need. As Vanessa recalls, she had to wake up at the same time every morning and take her temperature immediately back when she was trying to get pregnant; she says this proved to be extremely troublesome. Vanessa sought out a solution to solve this problem, and that’s how YONO was born.
Fertility intelligence, in your ear.
How is YONO different from all the other wearables and BBT thermometers in the market? First and foremost, the earpiece measures core body temperature instead of skin temperature, which helps increase accuracy.
More specifically: Most of the other sensors currently available measure skin temperature (say, on the user’s forearm or underarm), but this can easily be affected by ambient temperature. YONO, on the other hand, provides a “concealed and stable environment in the ear canal”. According to the folks at Yono Labs, the temperature in the ear canal is close to your core body temperature, which helps the YONO app arrive at more accurate predictions.
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On top of that: the YONO earbud also detects and records the temperature in the ear canal every five minutes. By the time a user wake up in the morning, YONO generally has 70 to 120 temperature readings that it can then analyze to determine said user’s BBT. Again, this will result in more accurate readings than traditional BBT thermometers, which only collect one data point per day.
How to buy the YONO earpiece
If you want to get your hands on YONO, the wearable is available for purchase on YONO’s site. YONO does not ship internationally for now, but you can use forwarders such as ComGateway to ship YONO to your doorstep.
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