Or at least that’s the premise behind Ovuline, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that helps women track a range of health indicators to predict the days they’re most fertile.

Even before the Quantified Self movement became a thing, healthcare providers, health sites and iPhone apps encouraged women to track signals like their basal body temperature, cervical fluid, emotions and ovulation test results to figure out when they might ovulate.

But while most apps and traditional pen and paper methods typically rely on historical cycles to pinpoint a woman’s fertile window, Ovuline says it uses machine learning to more precisely predict ovulation.

“Now, it’s all based on what happened in the past. The problem is that a lot of people have irregular cycles,” said CEO and co-founder Paris Wallace. “We’ve created the first pro-active ovulation calculator. … We’re understanding your cycle based on information you couldn’t otherwise glean yourself.”

The startup, which first debuted its app in September, said it’s been used by about 55,000 women. Now that its algorithms have learned from more than 2.5 million data points (instead of the 10,000 data points it started with), Ovuline is on Thursday taking its product of beta and launching with a more robust service.

Like plenty of other fertility-tracking apps on the market, Ovuline starts by helping women track their health indicators. But it analyzes an individual user’s data within the greater universe of its entire database and clinical guidelines to identify meaningful correlations and advise her when she’s approaching ovulation. According to the company, its service can help women get pregnant three times faster than the national average (which is four to six months).

Its newest version integrates with wearable fitness trackers like Fitbit devices (see disclosure), provides push notifications with personalized advice and lets women easily view an entire timeline of their data. If a user frequently reports feeling “stressed,” the app might send a note alerting her to the negative fertility consequences of excess levels of stress, or if she records lower than normal hours of sleep, she might receive messages on how low sleep levels can result in fertility-impeding hormones.

Enthusiastic Quantified Selfers — who carefully log and analyze their health data to uncover helpful insights — tend to be men. But using machine learning to make sense of women’s personal health data points the way to a future of data-driven medicine and shows the meaningful application of health-tracking activities that some currently see as mere naval-gazing.

Ovuline offers a free app that predicts ovulation, but premium versions (which cost up to $49.99) give women access to fertility experts and personal advice, the option to share data with partners and doctors and other features. Later this year, the company plans to roll out another application for pregnant women that similarly helps them track symptoms and lets them see how common or rare their experiences are relative to other users.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Announced Tuesday, the acquisition was a cash and stock deal valued at north of $100 million, according to sources close to the matter. With BodyMedia’s technology and expertise, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said, his company plans to further its innovation in health and wellness, as well as uncover new applications for wearable computing in general.

“We think that everything in the world is going to be smart and interconnected with lots of sensors,” said Rahman. “The more interconnecting points you have, the more signals you integrate in that system, the more intelligent things you can do for the user.”

BodyMedia: more than 500 trillion sensor points collected and analyzed

In the past few years, health tracking has become more en vogue with the launch of devices like the Nike Fuelband, Fitbit (see disclosure) and Up. But BodyMedia’s creators John (Ivo) Stivoric, an early innovator in wearable sensors and the co-founder of two design studios at Carnegie Mellon University, and Astro Teller, a former Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and entrepreneur, launched their company in 1999.

Since then, the company says its multi-sensor body monitors (like the armband worn by contestants on the TV show The Biggest Loser) have collected and analyzed more than 500 trillion sensor points. Unlike other consumer fitness trackers, BodyMedia’s devices have also received FDA clearance and are backed by clinical outcomes. In addition to selling direct-to-consumer, the company targets health professionals with wearable monitors that enable them to help people with obesity, diabetes and other conditions.

The 14-year-old company has raised $49 million from investors including Comcast Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet , Draper Triangle Ventures , Ascension Health Ventures and InCube Ventures.

Three phases for the wearable computing market

Right now, the wearables market is mostly in the accelerometer phase, said Rahman. With that technology, the Up wristband, for example, enables Jawbone to collect and provide users with information on their activity and sleep. But, he added, the BodyMedia acquisition will allow Jawbone to stake out a leading position in the next two phases of the market, which will revolve around multiple sensors on the body and the services and applications that connect and make sense of all that data.

As part of the acquisition, BodyMedia’s 60 employees will join Jawbone. For now, Rahman said, BodyMedia’s devices will continue to be sold under the BodyMedia brand. In time, he said the goal is for all of the devices to be part of the same “unified service system.” For example, if a person who uses an Up wristband to track day-to-day activity needs to share health information with a clinician for a condition, he could use a different monitoring device but it would integrate with the same software system.

“You have different events in your life that you need to be able to track and understand – this broadens and enriches our [suite of products] we can [offer] in the context of all of those life moments,” Rahman said.

The shift to passive tracking

Beyond health care, he added, “everything in the world is moving to passive tracking.” Consumers increasingly want their devices to just know where they are, how much they slept, how much they moved and what they might be interested in. More sensors means Jawbone can better understand its users and provide better services, he said.

In addition to announcing the BodyMedia acquisition, Jawbone said it had launched an “Up Platform” for iOS with 10 partners, including IFTTT, LoseIt, MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, Notch.me, RunKeeper, Sleepio, Wello and Withings. Users can merge their data from those apps with their Up data. For example, they can log a run in RunKeeper and then view the data in Up or step on a Withings scale and then monitor their weight in Up.  The company also said that it soon plans to extend the ecosystem of Up-integrated services by opening its API.

Jawbone declined to disclose how many people use the Up wristband, but said, in aggregate, the system tracks more than a billion steps and 610,000 hours of sleep each day and that, on average, users check their app five times a day and sync their data twice a day.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The larger promise of personalized medicine that considers genomic data on top of medical history and clinical data is still on the verge of reality. But, in the meantime, a few companies are at least beginning to bring a new level of personalization in health care to the web.

On Thursday, Palo Alto-based HealthTap, which lets people ask anonymous questions of a network of 35,000 doctors online, released a new feature that prompts them to tag questions with relevant personal characteristics, including age, gender, prior conditions and medications. (Previously, users had the option to tag questions, but now it’s more front and center and they can add personal characteristics across more variables.) The new addition enables that particular user to receive a tailored reply and also means that, as other users searching the site add information about themselves, they’ll see the content most specific to them.

“Amazon optimizes for your taste, Facebook optimizes for your social graph. We’re doing it for your health graph,” said HealthTap cofounder and CEO Ron Gutman.

HealthTap has long offered tools that enable users to store detailed personal health information with the goal of personalizing content but, as the demise of Google Health showed, consumer personal health records are a tough nut to crack.  People don’t care enough to take the time to fill out online forms if they don’t see the reasons for using them, or they’re concerned about privacy implications. HealthTap, which is HIPAA-compliant, is trying to meet people where they are, hoping that if they can see the benefits of providing a little bit of personal information, they’ll be incentivized to provide more.

Now that the site has provided more than half a billion answers (since launching in 2010), Gutman said it’s reached the critical mass for tagged answers to provide meaningful personalization.

Hoping to personalize digital content with data provided by personal health tracking devices, earlier this month, WebMD announced a partnership with Qualcomm Life’s 2net platform  to create a cloud-based health hub for consumers. Once users connect their tracking devices to the platform, WebMD said it would be able to aggregate data from those devices and use it to customize searches so that, instead of just getting generic diabetes information, users could receive content specific to their needs. The companies haven’t yet released anything but say they’d roll out their first product later this year. While consumers may see value in personalized information and insights, they could also be reticent to store their data in aggregate with a company known more for content than health services.

Smaller startups are also taking a stab at personalization with sites meant to take aim at “Dr. Google.” Symcat analyzes patient-provided symptoms and personal characteristics against disease prevalence data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other public sources to provide people with likely possible diagnoses. And Meddik goes beyond symptoms to help people access online articles, general resources and answers to questions provided by people in their “health networks” (or who share their condition profiles and symptoms). On both sites, as users participate online, they develop profiles that are used to customize future content they receive.

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But Tictrac has an answer to that in the form of a personal analytics dashboard that it launched in closed beta last year and opened up to the public this week.

The startup integrates with about 50 APIs to enable people to pull in data from apps like Runkeeper, trackers like Fitbit (see disclosure below) and sleep monitoring tools like Sleepio. Once the data is ingested in Tictrac, users can see easier-to-understand visualizations of each data stream as well identify relationships between the different parts of their lives.

“Our focus with Tictrac is around bringing together all lifestyle factors with respect to health,” said CEO and founder Martin Blinder. “What affects you in one aspect of your life will affect you in another.”

Since launching in private beta a year ago, the company has mostly focused on being a consumer web service. But, Blinder said, Tictrac has started working with employers and health and fitness experts to make health tracking more accessible and helpful to those with (or at risk for) chronic conditions. It recently closed a deal with European telecom company Telefonica to support a corporate wellness program and other similar partnerships are likely ahead.

On the site, Tictrac helps users organize their data around “projects” related to goals like losing weight or lifestyle changes like caring for a newborn. This week, the startup rolled out four new projects for asthma, diabetes, chronic bronchitis and blood pressure. Through those projects, health professionals and fitness coaches can tailor programs for their patients and clients and use the site to assess progress.

For example, for a patient at risk for diabetes, a doctor could create a project that outlines activity and nutrition recommendations and then follow the patient’s activity, weight loss, eating habits and more.  Because Tictrac allows users to integrate their calendars, travel schedules, email and other non-health data, a doctor monitoring a patient with asthma could use Tictrac to identify potential lifestyle patterns related to when asthma attacks were triggered.

Other startups and companies are starting to offer more sophisticated and social patient engagement and corporate wellness platforms. And Tictrac isn’t the only company looking to help consumers aggregate their health data to uncover insights. Earlier this month, for example, we reported that WebMD and Qualcomm Life have teamed up to offer a health hub that similarly enables people to sync and analyze data from multiple health tracking tools. But Tictrac (which has only raised an angel round but says it isn’t looking to raise more funding now because it’s earning revenue) is an interesting startup to watch because it makes the data easy to follow, visually compelling and meaningful.

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The Series B round was led by Mayfield Fund and included existing investors, DCM and Norwest Venture Partners. Basis said that Tim Chang, Managing Director at Mayfield, joins its board of directors and technology analyst and active digital health investor Esther Dyson and healthy living expert Deepak Chopra join its advisory board.

With the new funding, CEO Jef Holove said the company will focus on hiring, especially seeking expertise in cloud services, hardware and software, and scaling its manufacturing.

The new funding comes as interest in consumer health tracking devices, particularly those that worn on the wrist, is ballooning. Users can choose from the Nike Fuelband to the Jawbone Up to the Fitbit Flex (see disclosure below) to other options.

At $199, Basis is more expensive than the Up ($129), Fuelband ($149.99) and Flex ($99.95) and it’s bigger than its competitors’ sleek bands, which may be a turn off for those who want to downplay the accessory. But Holove said the Basis band uses four sensors to capture motion, heart rate, perspiration and skin temperature, as opposed to just one (an accelerometer) used by rivals. With those sensors, it can do more than just track activity and calories burned, it can monitor sleep and heart rate as well. He also said that its dashboard, which encourages healthy habits on top of displaying data, is better able to keep users engaged. He previously told GigaOM that, in the future, the company may upsell users on more advanced cloud services that could offer better analytics or more data storage.

“We believe our foundation… will continue to give a much more comprehensive picture of health than anything else on the market,” Holove said in an email. “As we gain more user feedback, we will also continue to evolve our healthy habits approach to build engagement over time.”

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About 7 in 10 American adults told the Pew Internet & American Life Project that they track a health indicator like weight, diet, exercise or a symptom. But despite growing buzz around the “quantified self” movement and the explosion of gadgets and apps that help people measure and analyze everything from their activity and sleep patterns to blood glucose levels and other vital signs, just a small slice of health trackers rely on high tech devices.

Indeed, according to the study released Monday, which was conducted via telephone and included 3,014 adults, nearly half of the trackers don’t use any kind of external tool at all.

Pew reports that 49 percent of the trackers said they track their progress “in their heads,” while 34 percent said they record the data on paper (for example, in a notebook or journal) and just 21 percent said they use some form of technology to track their health data. Respondents were allowed to provide more than one response, which is why the total is greater than 100 percent.  But Pew said it considers 50 percent of respondents to be “formal trackers” who log their data in an organized way with notebooks or apps and 44 percent to be “informal trackers” who only record progress in their heads.

A benchmark for the future

A Pew study from 2011 looked at the health tracking behaviors of U.S. Internet users, finding that a quarter of them track their health online. But Susannah Fox, Pew’s associate director of digital strategy, said this is the first national survey measuring health data tracking among the general population. As digital tools for monitoring health data continue to proliferate, this survey can provide a benchmark against which future progress can be measured.

“We’ve got this massive potential of a market and yet we still have relatively low uptake,” Fox said. “We don’t have the answers in terms of what will change their minds or entice them to change their habits. What we do know now is how many people are doing it and already what impact that is having. Maybe in the future, if people can be seduced to upgrade to fancier technology that will actually move the needle on their heath outcome.”

Implications for digital health companies

For companies pushing health-monitoring technology, Pew’s study could strengthen their case, as it shows that tracking can make a difference. For example:

• 46 percent of trackers said it changed their approach to maintaining their own health or the health of someone for whom they provide care.
• 49 percent said it led them to ask a doctor a new question or seek a second opinion.
• 34 percent it affected a decision about how to treat an illness or condition.

The report also indicates that there are several markets within health tracking that are ripe for the tapping.  Potential consumers span from casual health trackers interested in losing weight and improving their diet to those with chronic conditions to caretakers.

But the considerable number of people who seem content with taking the low-tech route means that digital health companies need to provide options that can compete with the convenience and familiarity of a notebook or the ease of just remembering information in your head. Developers and device makers are increasingly offering sophisticated health tracking and analysis technology. But, given that plenty of health apps are little more than digitized notebooks with minimal functionality, you can’t blame people who’d rather just scribble in a journal.

“The competition for mind share is not between different health apps,” said Fox. “It’s between health apps and a notebook and health apps and just your scale at home.”

You can check out the full report on Pew’s website, but here are some other interesting findings:

• The majority of respondents – 60 percent – say they track their weight, diet or exercise, with older Americans reporting that they’re more likely to track these metrics than younger Americans. About a third track health indicators like blood pressure, blood sugar, headaches or sleep patterns, and 12 percent say they track health indicators for a loved one.
• Those with no chronic conditions are least likely to say that they track health indicators (19 percent), while 40 percent of adults with one condition are trackers and 62 percent with 2+ conditions are trackers.
• Younger adults are more likely to keep track of their data in their heads (55 percent of 18-29 year-olds vs. 44 percent of those 65-year-olds and older), as are men (54 percent of men compared with 44 percent of women).

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Launched last year, the company offers a 12-month program that it says can help clients lose 10 or 15 percent of their body weight. On Tuesday, Retrofit announced that it had raised $8 million in a Series A round intended to help the company scale up and build out its product. The round was led by Draper, Fisher and Jurvetson and included new investors Correlation Ventures and Hyde Park Angels, as well as previous investors New World Ventures and I2A Fund.

For a monthly fee of $259 or $349 (the price depends on how much weight you want to lose), clients get access to a team of dieticians, exercise physiologists and behavior coaches, who communicate with them via Skype.  They also use a Wi-Fi enabled scale and wireless pedometer to monitor and share their activity with their Retrofit team. By observing clients’ activity, Retrofit’s experts can recommend the behavior modifications that can lead to lasting results, the company said.

With the rise of fitness tracking devices, like the Fitbit and Nike Fuelband, even long established programs like Weight Watchers are starting to take a more data-driven approach to weight loss. But Jeff Hyman, Retrofit’s founder and CEO, said his company offers a private program, which contrasts with Weight Watchers’ emphasis on group classes. He also said Retrofit prioritizes the behavior change aspect of weight loss.

“Half of what we do is focus on what goes on between the ears,” he said.

Retrofit says it has many hundreds of clients around the country and, to date, has raised $10.7 million in venture funding.

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Some keep track of their diet, exercise or health conditions with notebooks and journals. And, said Susannah Fox, associate director of digital strategy for the Pew Internet & American Life Project, others may measure their wellbeing in even more simplistic but still very tangible ways — like the fit of their favorite clothing. As the gadget- and app-enabled self-tracking trend grows, Fox’s observation shows that the distance between what people may do already and the new tools that could help them do it better isn’t as long as some may think.

In a post this week describing presentations she’s recently given, she said:

I don’t think of myself as a self-tracker. I don’t own a FitBit or a Zeo. I run, but I don’t track my mileage or my pace. I don’t even own a scale, relying on that time-honored measurement – do I fit into my skinny jeans?

Giving a sneak preview of an upcoming study from Pew and the California HealthCare Foundation, she said that 7 in 10 Americans could actually be considered self-trackers.

Specifically, the survey found:

• 60 percent of Americans track their weight, diet or exercise routine
• One-third of American adults track health indicators or symptoms, like blood pressure, blood sugar, headaches, or sleep patterns
• One-third of people caring for a loved one track a health indicator for that individual
• Half track on a regular basis and half track when something changes or a need arises
• One-fifth of self-trackers use an app, device, spreadsheet or website and one-third use a notebook or journal

Self-tracking can lead to real results

After a 2010 Pew study that included a few questions about using online tools for self-tracking, Fox told me that she listened to feedback from others in the health field who pointed out that, defined broadly, “self-tracking” isn’t a new or fringe phenomena.

The so-called “Quantified Self” movement, which celebrates the measurement of an individual’s each and every micro activity, may be male dominated. But citing health science strategist Carol Torgan, Fox said every woman who tracks her menstrual cycle is a self-tracker, as are men and women who monitor, even casually, their blood pressure or weight.

The Fitbits, Nike Fuelbands  and other health-tracking apps and devices are certainly gaining traction (see disclosure below), but many people still see that kind of self-monitoring as needless naval-gazing or just a plain hassle.  The challenge for health innovators isn’t just to target analytics junkies eager to track every bodily function, it’s to show average people, as well as those with chronic health conditions, how new tools can enhance the tracking that they’re already used to. There are certainly apps and tools out there trying to do this – apps for weight loss, fitness and women’s fertility, for example – but there’s still plenty of room to get even more people engaged in tracking their health.

For those who are healthy, and those who have chronic conditions but don’t take advantage of health monitoring tools, self-tracking can have very real benefits. The Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation survey found that 34 percent of self-trackers said data collection affected a health decision, 40 percent said it prompted them to ask a doctor new questions or seek a second opinion and 46 percent said it changed their overall approach to health.

“At the top of the pyramid are the Quantified Selfers and that’s a fine, lucrative market — there are businesses being built on that small percentage of pioneers. But if you want to build a broad-based business, then you need to be able to understand and segment the broader base [of people],” said Fox. “It’s a question of can we inspire people to upgrade their engagement.”

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As more self-tracking apps and devices – like the FitBit, Nike Fuelband and apps that track sleep, mood, meals and other activities – find their way to consumers, that future certainly seems more likely. But how we actually interact with all those streams of data is an open and interesting question, particularly given the fact that a minority of consumers currently take advantage of health tracking platforms and even tracking our finances (which can sometimes have more immediate consequences) can feel like a chore.

One of the visualizations of Wolfram’s activity.

At the Wired Health Conference Tuesday in New York, Wolfram was asked by Wired writer and author Steven Levy about how data from sensors and self tracking software could be incorporated into the clinical experience of the future.

“How am I going to find out what’s wrong with me… is my doctor a Genius Bar now?” Levy asked.

Wolfram replied: “People will watch their health in a way that’s a little closer to the way that they watch their financial portfolios.”

Just like fluctuations in financial data can be symptomatic of a problem with a stock, he said, patterns from personal data from sensors and devices could help alert individuals and healthcare providers to medical problems. A combination of human intelligence, experience and data could be used to diagnose a problem and then algorithmically-determined drugs and devices could be used for treatment, Wolfram added.

Already, in a less comprehensive way, that model of data interpretation is emerging to help people manage chronic conditions and achieve specific goals.

Healthrageous, a Boston-based startup we covered this week, uses data from blood glucose monitors, blood pressure cuffs, accelerometers and other health-tracking devices to provide personalized, day-to-day support for patients with diabetes, hypertension and other conditions. Tictrac, a UK-based company, aggregates a wide range of personal analytics – from social media engagement, travel and spending to physical activity and meals – to help consumers complete personal projects (such as losing weight or monitoring the development of a new baby). Ultimately, the site plans to pair consumers with data-savvy coaches who can help analyze their information to help individuals progress.

But some say self-tracking won’t make its full mark on health until it’s combined with artificial intelligence that can monitor data for us and let us know when we really need to pay attention.

At the Wired conference Monday, Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired and one of the early creators of the Quantified Self movement, said that Quantified Self technologies are still at the phase of the early computer, which wasn’t very powerful until it was married with the Internet.

“In Quantified Self, a lot of the tools that we’re talking about will have a limited kind of effect until they’re brought on to the Internet and until we have some kind of artificial intelligence to give attention to… the data we’re accumulating and alert us when the patterns are there,” he said.

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Founded in 2010, the company, which counts employers, insurance companies and other enterprises among its clients, provides a device-agnostic digital health platform that uses data from a range of health-tracking devices to help patients monitor blood pressure, blood glucose levels and other information to improve their behavior through customized messaging. For example, a patient managing diabetes could use the platform to monitor his blood glucose levels and receive medication reminders and other messages that consider when he might be most receptive to “digital coaching,” the kinds of incentives he would be most responsive to and even his level of engagement with social networks.

On Monday, Healthrageous announced that it had raised $6.5 million in Series B financing from North Bridge Venture Partners, Egan-Managed Capital, Long River and another undisclosed investor. The latest round brings the company’s total amount raised to $15 million.

Rick Lee, the company’s founder and CEO, said the company just completed reconstructing the platform to make it more scalable and durable and is preparing to include more open APIs as they are made available, particularly those from consumer-facing platforms (like FitBit, for example). With the new funding, it also plans to enhance its analytics engines and machine-learning platform.

Individuals on the platform are referred to the site (or volunteer) after a health screening identifies them as an at-risk patient for diabetes, hypertension or other conditions.  Then they use Healthrageous to define their goals, create their plans and determine the rewards most appropriate for them.  As users collect their data through biometric devices (from blood pressure cuffs and glucose meters to weight scales and accelerometers), personal health records, lab tests and other sources, Healthrageous aggregates, analyzes and learns from it to provide customized messages and data visualizations to encourage progress. Patients receive a device and platform for either preventing or managing a condition, simultaneously saving their employer or health plan the costs of treating that condition down the line, the company said.

While more consumers may be hopping on the health-tracking bandwagon with gadgets like the FitBit and Nike Fuelband, Lee said there’s a big difference in motivation between the Quantified Self hobbyist willing to use all kinds of device to track his every bodily function and someone who has attempted and failed multiple approaches to managing a condition like diabetes. Further, while other platforms exist for helping diabetes patients and others monitor their health, Healthrageous’ pitch is that it can figure out the best method and medium for keeping people motivated.

“Using machine learning, we personalize messaging back to consumers so that they fully take control of their own life and start to be more active in their health,” said Lee.

Since launching, it has attracted 32 employer clients, as well as handful of health plans and pharmaceutical manufacturers, to include 10,500 people on its platform and earn $1.7 million in revenue.

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