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The Maya App for tracking your periods and much else does so much more – it can end up having the man in your life sensitised to all that comes with menstruation!
Tracking your period using a calendar or diary is passe. Get smart with ‘Maya’ on your smartphone. Maya is an easy and fun to use period tracker (menstrual cycle calendar). However, it goes up a notch more than just fun. It not only tracks your periods but it also gives hints to you on related symptoms, mood swings, pregnancy and your overall health. When used regularly, it becomes a precious repository of your overall health to know what is normal and what is not with regards to your reproductive health.
Though the idea started as a simple period tracker, “It really hit us that the idea could actually be a lot more life changing when a friend who had an unplanned pregnancy but was under medication contraindicated for pregnancy leading to complications”, says John Paul, CEO Plackal Tech that conceived the Maya App.
The Maya app not only breaks the taboo around women’s sexual and reproductive health, it gives an understanding of one’s own body to the million plus active users globally. It has the potential to become a rich depository of data on women’s reproductive health. From being a simple period tracker, Maya could actually help you understand what symptoms are normal, and when exactly do you experience them. It could also (and has) help you plan your pregnancy by understanding your ovulation cycle.
The Maya app has recently launched a community that would let the users interact among themselves as well as with gynecologists. Maya app empowers the users with the information that they need which was otherwise scattered and forgotten. This is very important in the Indian context where women are only reactive to their reproductive health and it is not uncommon for someone to have not met a gynecologist in decades.
Consider this. Your periods are a few days late and you wonder why. With the Maya app, you can check out your historic data and see for yourself if this delay is normal or is it an alert to consult a gynecologist.
Again, consider this slightly hypothetical situation (which soon could be a reality). You are a 25 year old woman from Bangalore with cycles of a certain length and you experience certain symptoms. Maya app, based on its data from 100,000 other people, could give you a list of probable issues you might have to watch out for. This could be groundbreaking at different levels.
From being a taboo topic, a woman’s reproductive health has seen significant perspective change in the past few decades. Of late, many men are coming forward to working towards breaking the taboo around the menstruation cycle. John Paul says, “Maya has absolutely changed the way I view a woman. Before Maya, when family and friends talked about emotional ups and downs, I am guilty of saying ‘Its all in your mind’. But once we got down to the science of it, we figured that this is a reality for women and it gave me a lot of empathy”. And that makes us hopeful, for with empathy we don’t see eye to eye, we see heart to heart.
Watch Prathibha Sastry in conversation with John Paul, CEO Plackal Tech and Founder, Maya App.
Image source: YouTube
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