Hormones Can Wreak Havoc, Aavia Can Help
There are plenty of apps on the market that are meant to track your menstrual cycles, from fertility windows to predicting your periods. But they often stop at that, not taking into account other impacts of hormones.
Aavia is a daily app that tracks more than just periods. It’s heavily focused on hormone levels and how they impact all aspects of life, from “mood and sex drive to quality of sleep and risk of injury,” according to their website.
Aya Suzuki, co-founder of Aavia, was a junior at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), when the idea for the app was born. She was experiencing unexplained migraines, for which she eventually sought out medical attention.
“My doctor didn't know what was going on, and she referred me to an optometrist, because she thought maybe there's something wrong with my eyes, and she also referred me to a neurologist because she thought maybe there's something in my brain that's causing this,” Suzuki explains, “and at the end of the day, she just came back and [said] ‘I think you're just stressed, and you need to stress less.’ And obviously I was not satisfied with that answer.”
This led her to begin tracking her migraines, which showed that they always came right before her period. As she researched further, she discovered her migraines were hormonal.
“This was the first time I even learned about hormones and how they can affect you more than just the days that you're bleeding,” Suzuki says. “Now that I know I'm more susceptible to having migraines the week before my period, I know that week not to drink coffee, not to look at screens too long, sleep a little bit earlier.”
“Making these small lifestyle adjustments to my own life actually helped me really mitigate a lot of the migraines that I've had, and as we started to do a lot of user research, we realized that these types of stories were really common,” she says.
Inspired by her own medical journey, Suzuki, along with co-founders Aagya Mathur and Alexis Wong, developed Aavia to be more than just a period and fertility tracker like many other products in the app store.
“The way that we structured our app is that you come in and you swipe a few cards to log every single day, and we put in an effort to tell the user that this is a daily app, and we're here to show you your daily trends,” Suzuki explains. “There's so much to life besides maybe the three or five years that you might be pregnant in your later years, so let's think through the whole cycle.”
The free version of the app offers an extensive list of personal trends to log, including mood, period, movement, sleep, appetite, and more. Based on log trends, it estimates your hormone levels and provides your “hormonoscope,” identifying which menstrual phase your body is in and suggesting what to try out and what to avoid during the phase. There’s even a “community” section to connect with other users.
The paid version, or VIP, offers even more personalized benefits, like “actually giving you the recommendations for those lifestyle changes that you can make,” Suzuki says.
For example, she explains, if someone has a pattern of high energy every third week of their cycle, the VIP upgrade would recommend a high intensity workout during that time.
They also have a medical advisory board, composed of obstetrician-gynecologists (or OB/GYNs) and a reproductive psychiatrist, who ensure that the recommendations are sound medical advice that will benefit people.
Aavia developers are expanding the capabilities of the app to further cater to each individual user. Some of their future plans include helping people flag certain conditions they could have based on the symptoms they log, as well as showing impact reports on how people’s lives actually change based on the changes they make through their app use.
“We’re hoping that by logging and actually learning about the trends of your cycle, you can also pay attention to some things that might not be in the healthy range necessarily and for you to do something about it before it could cause other health problems down the line,” Suzuki says.
She says the ultimate goals of Aavia are to help individuals learn more about their bodies and to contribute to the larger cause of advocating for women’s health.
“When it comes to your cycle, things are fluctuating up and down, so it's important to listen to your body, and we’re hoping that people will really learn about their cycles by tracking and learning about their patterns,” she says.
“It's just sad how little data there is when it comes to women's health, so we're hoping to also contribute to a larger cause of understanding these conditions a little bit better,” Suzuki adds, “to fill some of that gender gap when it comes to health needs.”