The Role of Auto-detection in Fertility Awareness Education

At Cyclisity, our core belief is that the Fertility Awareness Method is a superpower and should be accessible to every woman. This quest to make FAM accessible to all women motivated our co-founder Toni Weschler as she wrote Taking Charge of Your Fertility, and it likewise drove us as we built this app. We sought to make Cyclisity accessible to women through elegant and simple design, a focus on education, and a close pairing with the TCOYF knowledge-base. But a key component of accessibility I'd like to touch on here is our choice to build our auto-detection feature, which applies the four FAM rules to a user's inputted data, in order to automatically draw the coverline, peak day and fertile phase. To be more specific, it applies the four FAM rules (the First 5 Days rule, Dry Day rule, Peak Day rule and Thermal Shift rule) for women who choose the ovulation and cycle tracking goal, and applies the pregnancy achievement guidelines from TCOYF when pregnancy achievement is marked as the goal. Because the application of the four FAM rules is the more important and nuanced discussion, I'll be focusing on this area as we discuss auto-detection.

We believe strongly that auto-detection is an educational tool, one that helps women check their own work and feel confident in their application of the four FAM rules. We have never viewed it as a short cut, but as a supportive guide. Within our auto-detection feature, if you click on any day in your chart, Cyclisity will also walk you through exactly how the four FAM rules were applied to that day and your chart to generate a coverline, peak day and fertile phase. To our knowledge, no other app in the Apple app store does this, where a user can literally see exactly how the four FAM rules were applied to their chart, and we are very proud of the many engineering hours we've put into this educational feature.

If Cyclisity did not have auto-detection, we would simply become a replacement for pen and paper, and would lose this educational aspect. We have no issue with other cycle tracking apps that have chosen to avoid auto-detection and allow users to draw their coverline and peak day anywhere on the chart, but as our goal is to faithfully follow the rules as outlined in Taking Charge of Your Fertility exactly, we believe our approach can help improve accessibility and education. Our goal is not just to record data, but to help teach the Fertility Awareness Method in a clear, transparent way.

Let's discuss a potential scenario of a user who emails us and asks, "Why is my coverline missing?" or perhaps "Why is my coverline here and not there?". By illustrating how we at Cyclisity answer these questions, hopefully it makes it clear why we believe auto-detection is such a useful feature. As a side note, we highly encourage every user to always check their own work against Cyclisity, and if they don't see a coverline or peak day or fertile phase where they think they should see one, or have any number of other questions, please email us and we will answer it together.

To start, the symptothermal method as taught in Taking Charge of Your Fertility is built on standardized if-then logical rules. These are not random interpretations, gut-feelings, or hidden calculations. They are completely deterministic. They are established rules that can be taught, understood, and applied consistently. That said, in our view, a proper application of the four FAM rules is just one-third of what's needed to practice the full FAM method. The other two-thirds are the data being entered properly itself, and looking at the big picture of the chart.

Now what do I mean by the "big picture" of the chart? When a user emails us and asks "why is my coverline missing", the first thing we look at is to try to see the big picture. Is there a biphasic pattern to the temperature? Is there an obvious place for a coverline to go to separate the low temperature pre-ovulatory follicular phase from the high-temperature, post-ovulatory luteal phase? Is there an obvious peak day in the cervical fluid, typically just before the thermal shift? This view of the big picture is crucial when answering questions about charts.

Next, we look at the data that has been entered. Is there an outlier high temperature before the thermal shift that, that if it were disregarded (Toni calls this the "rule of thumb" in TCOYF), the coverline would now appear where the big picture shows it should? Perhaps that temperature was taken later in the morning than typically done, and so was unusually high? Are there outlier low temperatures that occured after ovulation, during the peak + 3 count, that invalidated the coverline because of the Fall Back Thermal Shift rule? Temperature readings can be noisy, and this is where the art of the Fertility Awareness Method becomes apparent, since knowing what data points to trust, and what data points to safely disregard is an art and comes from experience. Typically, when only a single data point can be disregarded or slightly altered, and now the entire chart makes sense and the coverline is drawn where the big picture shows it should be, that's usually the right move.

Part of the art of the Fertility Awareness Method is in truly understanding how to measure your data properly. How to measure cervical fluid, knowing when to mark it creamy or eggwhite, knowing when a temperature reading is trustworthy because it was taken the right way at the right time in the morning, and knowing how to measure your cervical position. Without proper measurements, any method is garbage-in garbage-out, so this is an area for all FAM practitioners to focus on. Some may even want additional help from FAM educators to ensure they feel comfortable.

Now, during all this analysis, nowhere was the validity of the rules called into question. There was never a moment where it was possible that the four FAM rules just were not applicable, and a coverline or peak day needed to be drawn where the rules would not allow it to be drawn. The rules were always respected and properly applied, but it was just the data itself that had to be looked at and potentially slightly altered to fit the big picture of the chart, to allow a strict interpretation of the rules to align with the big picture.

When a user has a question on a chart, the solution is never to change the four FAM rules to fit the chart. Rather, the solution is to address the data and ensure that questionable or outlier data points are either disregarded or slightly changed, if suddenly this makes the four FAM rules line up with the big picture. Exactly how much leeway a user has to modify their data to fit the big picture of their chart, or how to interpret the big picture of the chart itself, is completely up to the user and is the art of FAM. This is why Cyclisity is simply an educational tool and users always have to interpret their charts themselves.

Now, just because the validity of the rules was never called into question, this does not mean that the application of the rules is a simple thing. FAM practitioners can and often do forget FAM rules and subrules all the time. Although the four FAM rules are simple on the surface, there are many subrules for each FAM rule that can be easy to forget. How many users remember that if a slow-rise thermal shift is occurring, if the temperature sits on the coverline for 2 days in a row, the coverline should be removed and a new coverline should wait to be formed? How many remember that if you have several days of creamy cervical fluid after your eggwhite cervical fluid day, your peak day should be the last day of creamy, not the eggwhite day? This isn't a complaint about the typical FAM user's knowledge of the FAM rules, but is an acknowledgement that not everyone has the time to stay perfectly up to date on all the subrules present in TCOYF, which can be scattered throughout the book. This is the ideal place for a computer, with perfect memory, to help out as a double-check. Indeed, every rule and subrule in TCOYF and many edge-cases are coded into Cyclisity, and it's all there to help you practice the method properly.

This is why we believe auto-detection is such a powerful and helpful feature of Cyclisity. Not all users can afford to hire FAM instructors to make sure their knowledge of every subrule is rock-solid. Similarly, not everyone has the time to work one-on-one with an instructor. Schedules, work demands, family responsibilities, and life circumstances can make that difficult, even when education is affordable or freely offered. We of course believe that FAM instructors are a great part of the FAM community and are important for those FAM practitioners who wish to receive more training or who want help with their charts, but we shouldn't expect that everyone can afford or will have the time for such additional help. With auto-detection, a user can focus on putting in the best quality data they can to Cyclisity, have a good knowledge of the four FAM rules, but still practice the method very well without knowing every subrule perfectly. We ideally recommend that FAM practitioners know every subrule inside and out, but if we ever hope for FAM to reach mass adoption, we can't expect everyone to be such an expert. As noted above, just putting in high quality data is an art in and of itself, as is looking at the big picture of your chart.

To go one step further, we believe that requiring users to input the required data to produce a coverline or peak day or fertile phase, in accordance with a strict application of the FAM rules, is more helpful than allowing users to draw a coverline or peak day or fertile phase wherever they want. Yes, it can be a hindrance to require users to put in 6 days worth of temperature data to get a coverline, but if you don't do that, you are no longer practicing the symptothermal method as taught in TCOYF, and we would rather users practice the method properly, even if a bit more onerous. If users could draw their coverline and peak day and fertile phase wherever they wanted, many would do so correctly, but some would not. With auto-detection, everyone has to put in the data required to get an output, and if they don't see the output they expect, it's a great time to learn why that is.

That said, our Cyclisity app will never be able to look at the big picture of a chart and interpret it, or know whether a data point is high quality or questionable, or be able to make the decision to disregard a data point on its own. These are questions the user herself must answer, and is part of knowing your body and becoming an experienced FAM practitioner.

By making the Fertility Awareness Method more approachable and accessible, the entire community benefits. As more women learn about their cycles and become curious about FAM, more people will naturally seek deeper support, personalized guidance and expert instruction. Increased awareness expands the entire field. However, we expect that many FAM practitioners will be self-taught through reading TCOYF, and we want to provide the educational tools through Cyclisity to help them chart with confidence.

To sum it all up, we see the "art" of practicing FAM as being the most present in measuring and entering high-quality data, in looking at the big picture of the chart and seeing where a coverline and peak day should go based on that big picture, and in knowing what data points can be disregarded or slightly modified in order to make a strict application of the four FAM rules line up with the big picture. Although important, we see the strict application of the four FAM rules and their subrules as a place where an app like Cyclisity can help, because these rules are all explicit if-then statements, and should always be applied the same way given the same underlying data. This is why we see our auto-detect feature being so helpful, because it allows users to practice FAM at a high level while knowing they have a careful double-check on their work.

Cyclisity is not just about technology. It is about education, transparency, accessibility, and helping more women build a deeper understanding of their own bodies.


Disclaimer

Cyclisity is an educational tool designed to support fertility awareness learning. Cyclisity is not an FDA-approved medical device and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional regarding medical concerns.