The Ava Bracelet: An Honest Review
- Macy Hill
- Jan 19, 2019
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 4, 2020
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(This review is of the 1.2 version of the Ava bracelet. Ava no longer sells this version but now sells the updated 2.0 bracelet.)
My body took a while to recover after our loss in June. I was unsure of when I would get my period again which was causing me a lot of stress! It can take a really long time for it to come back, and I didn't want to waste any time if I was actually fertile in the month I was in. My cycle has never been perfectly regular and I seemed to have lots of issues. At one point my doctor was sure I had endometriosis. The only way to diagnose me would be exploratory surgery, and I was never quite ready for that. My periods were so difficult and caused me so much pain that I had to use the pill continuously for seven years. The decision to start trying for a baby was a difficult one because I would have to say hello to my cycle again and be bed ridden for a week out of every month until I finally got pregnant. Thankfully when I stopped using the pill I only had regular cramps. I've never been so relieved to have pain that I could actually deal with. We tried for five months before conceiving our first baby, and I honestly was flying blind. I could never nail down when or even if I was ovulating. I used ovulation strips every day and only caught a positive test once. If only there was something that would tell me exactly what my body was up to!
After doing some research I discovered the Ava bracelet. Ava is a wearable device that gives you insight into your cycle, stress level, and sleep quality. They have a ton of research and testimonials on their website. After looking at it for a few days I asked my husband if we could go ahead and splurge on this little piece of hardware. It was a good chunk of change for us at the time, but we both agreed it would save us a lot of sanity, and help us get our baby as soon as possible. I ordered the bracelet for a couple hundred dollars, but then discovered that they will allow you to earn all of that money back! They actually send you a referral code that gives someone else twenty dollars off of their purchase and also gives you twenty dollars back. You can keep getting refunded until you have a total refund.
Okay, so how does this thing work? You simply wear the bracelet every night when you go to sleep, and in the morning you sync the bracelet with your phone. It will then show you a graph like the one shown below.
Ava will track your resting pulse rate, skin temperature, heart rate variability, and sleep quality. All of these things play into your monthly cycle. Resting pulse rate tends to increase after ovulation has occurred and remains elevated after conception. Skin temperature is low during the follicular phase (before the release of the egg) and is higher after ovulation. Heart rate variability will show you how stressed you are. Breathing rate is lower right before ovulation and rises shortly after. When trying to conceive it is very important to know when you will be ovulating. Ovulation occurs when an egg is released from the ovary and waits to be fertilized by sperm. Your egg only lives for around twelve to twenty-four hours which gives you a short amount of time to work with. On the other hand sperm can survive for up to five days. The most critical time to "baby dance" is a couple days prior to ovulation. When you do this the sperm can simply chill out and wait for the egg to say hello. Ava uses the parameters it tracks to give you a "fertile window". This window consists of the seven days before it predicts ovulation. The word "predicts" is very important here. Ava will take a while to understand you. The website claims that it takes three or more cycles to become more accurate.
I conceived Zoe on my third cycle with Ava. The bracelet was not accurately predicting my fertile window yet, but it was getting very close. I used a cocktail of apps and tests in conjunction with Ava to understand my body a little quicker than Ava could teach me at this early stage. Anyone can use a fertility thermometer to track their temperature, but I could never get into the habit of taking my temperature before I got out of bed every morning. It also was not accurate if you had to get up during the middle of the night. The reason Ava made temperature tracking so easy was that it took my readings when I was in my deepest sleep so it didn't matter if I had to wake up during the night, and I could simply wear it and forget about it. In addition to wearing Ava faithfully I invested in more ovulation predictor strips. You can click here to get a cheap box of fifty. You simply pee on the strips every day until the test line is as dark or darker than the control line. These strips test for the presence of luteinizing hormone. You always have some of this hormone circulating in your body which is why the color of the line is so important. When you get the positive line this is telling you that you are getting a surge of this hormone. Luteinizing hormone is released in abundance when your body is about to release an egg. This is helpful to know because you get a positive test around two days before the egg is actually released. That's right, it's time to baby dance.
I also highly recommend tracking your cycle using an app called glow. It is free to download and has many useful tools, but I want to focus on the ovulation test analyzer. Sometimes that line can be very tricky to read. This analyzer will tell you if you really have a positive test or not.
This saves you so much time and worry. Glow has some really informative articles that it shares with you daily along with forums you can join to gain a sense of community. You may also notice that in the second picture I got two positive surges in one cycle! This confused me too but it's because I was actually pregnant when I took the second test. Apparently hCG or "human chorionic gonadotropin" can mimic luteinizing hormone. Do NOT use an ovulation test to confirm a pregnancy, but in this case that is what it was doing for me. Okay, let's move along shall we.
The app that I found to be most helpful was fertility friend. Fertility friend is free to download and you get a month to access all of the VIP tools for free. I do recommend getting the VIP membership if it is taking you a while to conceive. They have a pregnancy tracker that shows you how good your chances are that month based on the data you plug in to it. I used my Ava data and plugged it in to fertility friend which gave me this graph.
At the beginning of my graph is my follicular phase. I had not ovulated yet and so my temperature was low. The cross hairs are landing on the day that I ovulated. It was confirmed three days after because my temperature rose for three consecutive days. It remained level and then rose again! The reason my temperature kept rising was because I was pregnant. If I wasn't pregnant my temperatures would have steadily gone down until my period arrived. All of this informations is overwhelming at first, but you will get the hang of it after a few cycles. Fertility friend most accurately predicted ovulation, but I could not have used fertility friend if I didn't have the data from my bracelet. I absolutely believe Ava was starting to learn my body, but I was able to conceive before she did because I used a handful of tools.
I do want to say that I realize this formula and these tools are only helpful when you do not have other obstacles like anovulation or sperm abnormalities, but these tools will help you if everything else seems to be working properly. If you are trying to conceive after a loss I want to tell you to let your body heal and please be patient with it. You will struggle with some level of hormone imbalance afterwards because your body is trying to go back to normal. I have had to take breaks from trying to conceive because it was dominating my life. Evaluate your thoughts from time to time and make sure this process is not taking control of everything else. Believe me, I know the previous sentence is way easier said than done. Stay sane and join communities for other women that are in the same boat as you. It helps so much to just talk about your struggles. Always realize there is a next step even if the last step of your journey is adoption. I'm here for you, ladies. If you have any more questions I would love to help. Leave a comment, email, or direct message me in instagram!
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