One year after PayPal founder Max Levchin helped launch Glow, the fertility app has some impressive results: the service takes credit for 25,000 pregnancies. As notes stream in from excited users, often accompanied by photographs of astonished newborns, it’s hard not to get the warm fuzzies.
一年前，贝宝（PayPal）创始人麦克斯•列夫琴参与推出了“好孕”应用软件Glow。现在，这一应用已经带来了可观的成果——2.5万名女性通过它成功晋级准妈妈。兴奋不已的用户发来的感谢信如雪片般飞来，不少信函还带有新生宝宝表情惊异的照片，这不免让人觉得心里暖烘烘的。
Helping people become parents, it turns out, is just the start for Glow. Its founders have a bigger vision in mind: to add research to a field where data is lacking. They want to use the information Glow collects about reproductive cycles to improve women’s health more broadly. This has led to several new ventures, including launching a new post-conception app and gathering anonymized user information for use in studies for the medical community.
事实证明，帮助用户升级为父母只是Glow公司迈出的第一步。它的创始人怀揣着更大的愿景，那就是把研究引进一个缺乏数据的领域。他们想用Glow应用收集的生育周期信息来更全面地提高女性健康水平。这种抱负已经催生了一些新的项目，包括推出一个新的怀孕后应用软件，收集匿名用户信息供医学界进行研究。
For the unfamiliar, Glow collects information about reproductive cycles. It uses algorithms to track the progress of a woman’s period, calculate when she’s ovulating, and ultimately predict when the next window of fertility opens. The app is free, though there is a paid option called Glow First. (Fortunefirst wrote about Glow a year ago.)
对不熟悉它的人来说，Glow的功能就是收集生育周期信息。它用算法来跟踪女性的经期，计算她们的排卵时间，从而最终预测下一次受孕机会窗口从什么时候开启。这是一款免费的应用软件，同时也提供一个名叫Glow First的应用内购买项目【《财富》（Fortune）一年前率先对Glow进行过报道】。
To accomplish its research goals, Glow must market to a broader group of women and not just those who are trying to get pregnant. Today, Glow reports that half of its users aren’t even trying to get pregnant—they use the app to take advantage of the insights it can provide, such as warning signs for endometriosis. (The company won’t say how many people in total are using it.)
为了实现研究目标，Glow必须获得范围更广的女性用户，而不仅仅是那些正在设法怀孕的女性。该公司表示，目前一半的Glow用户都不是为了受孕，而是用它来了解自己的健康情况，比如是否有子宫内膜异位的迹象（该公司没有说明Glow的用户总数）。
“We’re able to just get the data and apply information so that we can return something useful,” says Mike Huang, Glow’s chief executive.
Glow公司首席执行官麦克•黄说：“我们可以获得数据并且运用这些信息，然后把一些有用的东西反馈出去。”
This was the plan from the start. After launching Glow in last August, Levchin (who serves as executive chairman) and Huang made modifications to appeal to women who weren’t trying to conceive (often shortened to the acronym “TTC”). Glow 3.0 launched in January, with new features intended for women who only want to track their periods and better understand their menstrual cycles.
这就是最初的计划。去年8月份建立这家公司后，列夫琴（现任该公司执行董事长）和麦克•黄做出了一些调整，目的是吸引那些并未尝试受孕（通常被简称为TTC）的女性。1月份推出的Glow 3.0版专门为那些只想追踪并更好地了解自身经期的女性提供了一些新功能。
In July, the company took another step. It launched Glow Nurture, a separate mobile application tailored to pregnancy rather than fertility. In essence, the new app intends to answer the question, “We’ve conceived. Now what?”
7月份，该公司又向前迈进了一步——它推出了另一款移动应用软件Glow Nurture，对象是准妈妈们，而不是想受孕的人群。这款新应用的核心就是回答一个问题：“我怀上宝宝了，然后呢？”
“We’ve been getting tons and tons of requests over the past several months for the same data-driven approach [as the original Glow app] with a high-quality, warm design,” Huang says of the new app.
对于Glow Nurture，黄表示：“过去几个月中，许多人都希望我们推出同样的数据驱动型软件（就像Glow一样]，而且质量要高，设计要贴心。”
Together, the two apps are accruing so much data from women trying to conceive and women tracking their menstrual cycles that Glow is sitting on one of the largest datasets for women’s reproductive health ever assembled, says Jennifer Tye, Glow’s head of marketing. Which is why Glow wants to do something with it.
该公司营销负责人詹妮弗•泰伊指出，通过这两款软件，他们从正在尝试受孕和追踪自己经期的女性那里得到了非常多的信息，该公司由此掌握了有史以来规模最大的女性生殖健康数据库。正是出于这个原因，Glow才想用它来做点儿什么。
“We really do believe it will change the way we all understand women’s reproductive health,” Tye says.
泰伊说：“我们真的相信这将改变我们所有人对女性生殖健康的理解方式。”
The company’s first attempt at publishing research will come in October when Dr. Philip Chenette, a specialist at the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco and a medical adviser to Glow, will present at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s annual conference. ASRM recently accepted an abstract for a paper that Chenette and Glow data scientist Chris Martinez wrote and submitted, drawing from user-anonymized data.
该公司将在10月份首次尝试对外公布研究成果。届时，旧金山太平洋不孕症研究中心（Pacific Fertility Center）专家、Glow公司医学顾问菲利普•切尼特博士将在美国生殖医学协会（ASRM）年会上介绍这方面的情况。最近，ASRM接受了切尼特和Glow公司数据科学家克里斯•马丁内斯提交的论文摘要，这篇论文由两人利用匿名用户数据撰写而成。
It’s unclear how the medical community will receive their research. Aparna Sridhar, a clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California Los Angeles, says that period-tracking apps are great ways for women to understand their cycles better, but the information aggregated by them may not be 100% accurate.
还不清楚医学界对他们的研究会持怎样的态度。加州大学洛杉矶分校（University of California Los Angeles）妇产科临床医学教授阿帕娜•斯里达尔认为，经期跟踪应用软件是一种非常好的工具，可以帮助女性更好地了解自己的经期，但用这种软件收集的信息可能不完全准确。
“My idea of an app that is really good is one that has had rigorous testing to say that ‘this really helps,’ with proper groupings,” Sridhar says, adding that it’s important for any app to do this before making any assumptions on its data. “You have to look at their research really carefully,” she says.
斯里达尔说：“按照我的理解，真正的好应用应该经过严格测试，从而可以得出‘它确实能帮助’某些群体的结论。”她还表示，对任何打算对它所掌握数据下结论的软件来说，这一点都很重要，“必须非常小心地对待他们的研究。”
Huang says Glow has no intention of producing medical publications of its own, but continues to believe that the data and insights it collects can be helpful to the medical community. There remains a dearth of statistical knowledge about women’s reproductive health. For Glow, every little bit helps.
麦克•黄指出，Glow公司无意自行发表医学报告，但该公司仍认为它所收集的数据和观察意见能为医学界提供帮助。女性生殖健康数据依然匮乏。对Glow公司来说，任何零星数据都有其用武之地。
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