A new app for women promises to help females maximize athletic training during their menstrual cycle.
The FitrWoman app is produced by a company called Orreco, a sports and data science company that has partnered with IBM Corp. to utilize Watson supercomputing power for digital coaching. The Irish company announced a $2 million Series A funding round by True Ventures earlier this year.
The app, which Orreco said was developed by a team of women, provides individualized data about a woman’s menstrual cycle to suggest training and nutrition advice — including different training types and recipes based on hormone levels — to maximize performance.
FitrWoman provides an outline of how user’s physiology changes during their period. Users can also be warned of certain ailments or injuries they may be more susceptible to while training during their menstrual cycle, as well as a calendar that shows when their next period is due.
Orreco Product Development Manager Grainne Conefrey, who conceived of and led development of the FitrWoman app, said the benefits of the product are its “evidence-based solutions,” which it provides to women using Orreco’s large swath of historical user data and Watson’s analytics.
“Many already know that changing hormone levels can negatively affect mood and energy levels and how the body responds to certain types of training — they just don’t know how to influence those factors,” Conefrey said in a statement.
The Orreco team is comprised of data scientists who have a combined 16 PhDs. The company has worked with 35 Olympic medalists since the 2000 Olympics Games in Sydney and has published more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
In a statement, Orreco CEO Brian Moore said the company plans to develop more products that focus specifically on the female athlete.
“We believe that the research into female athletic performance is sorely lacking and are continually investing to add to the knowledge base to help our clients to perform at their highest level,” he said.
