Smith, A. D., & Smith, J. L. (2014). billingsMentor: Adapting natural family planning to information technology and relieving the user of unnecessary tasks. The Linacre Quarterly, 81(3), 219-238. https://doi.org/10.1179/2050854914Y.0000000024
Smith AD, Smith JL. billingsMentor: Adapting natural family planning to information technology and relieving the user of unnecessary tasks. Linacre Q. 2014;81(3):219-238. doi:10.1179/2050854914Y.0000000024
Smith, Audrey D., and John L. Smith. "billingsMentor: Adapting natural family planning to information technology and relieving the user of unnecessary tasks." The Linacre Quarterly, vol. 81, no. 3, 2014, pp. 219-238.
For EndNote, Zotero or Mendeley:
Open access
No open license is recorded for this paper. Reuse terms are set by the publisher.
Open Access
Free full text on PubMed Central (PMC4135461)
RRM Academy Synopsis
BillingsMentor recognized the Peak as well as teacher-guided students
In a test on the saved records of 54 students, the online Billings Method service billingsMentor recognized the Peak of fertility as well as the teacher/student analysis did. The program found 171 Peaks that the analysis also found. It was slightly less efficient at establishing the basic infertile pattern.
Key Findings
The 54 students, each with at least 300 days of teacher guidance, comprised 19 with no recent fertility history events, 21 breastfeeding and 14 who had recently ceased hormonal medication.
BillingsMentor and the teacher/student analysis recognized 171 Peaks in common; the teacher/student analysis recognized 31 further Peaks and billingsMentor recognized 38 further Peaks.
Bleeding consistent with a normal luteal phase followed 21 of the 38 Peaks that only billingsMentor recognized, and bleeding consistent with a short luteal phase followed 7.
After adjusting for the circumstances of 16 students, billingsMentor sorted 7,058 days into luteal phase or basic infertile pattern, 93 percent of the adjusted teacher/student total of 7,602 days.
Disputed Peaks arose for 32 students. For 11 of them the teacher/student analysis recognized the first disputed Peak, and for 21 billingsMentor did.
Interpretation
The authors tested billingsMentor in a laboratory experiment on historical records. They entered each student's first 300 daily observations and compared the program's reading with the teacher/student charts. The authors report that they could explain every case of disagreement. Many students were breastfeeding, had recently stopped hormonal medication or had irregular fertility, and the authors state that such records gave a more rigorous test than regular cycles would. The authors note that it remains to be shown that clients can learn to read their own fertility signs correctly with only the program's guidance.
RRM Context
The Billings Method is a fertility awareness-based method. Each day a woman records the feel and look of her cervical mucus. Restorative reproductive medicine is cycle-charting-informed, so a woman's daily observations count as clinical information. The authors provide the free service in several languages.
Our editorial summary of this paper, not the article's abstract.
Abstract
BillingsMentor is an automated Web-based service for the Billings Method of natural family planning in which the guidance and interpretation previously communicated from teacher to student is provided by programmed algorithms. There are two functions: (1) to instruct the client to generate proper descriptions of her fertility symptoms; and (2) to interpret the symptoms efficiently according to the Billings Method and to communicate the results to the client. The efficiency of billingsMentor was tested by using the historical records of students who were under the guidance of a teacher to emulate their experience under the guidance of billingsMentor. The results indicate that billingsMentor performs as well as the teacher/student in recognizing the peak of fertility but it is slightly less efficient than the teacher/student in establishing the basic infertile pattern. Advantages that arise from adapting natural family planning to information technology are discussed.
