New gadget could help couples conceive
Print Edition
CALL home, check your e-mail, count your sperm: Taiwan start-up Aidmics is hoping to cash in on the human fertility market with an iPad compatible gadget it calls iSperm.
Aidmics developed the product to help livestock farmers, but founder Agean Lin next year plans to seek approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration to expand its use to men. “In the US, one out of every six couples has trouble conceiving,” Lin said.
Investment advisory Harris Williams estimates the global fertility market to be worth about US$40 billion.
ISperm was released commercially last August and has sold nearly 200 sets to farms around the world. It isn’t the first at-home sperm tester but the only one that offers instant fertility measurements combined with live visuals of the sperm.
Lin said he aims to price the iSperm device between US$100 and US$200, a fraction of the cost of the commercial version.
The technology is simple: a tiny microscope enlarges the contents of a few drops of semen inside a pipette, lit by a backlight.
The light beams the moving image to the iPad camera, and algorithms then analyze the sample for sperm count and how fast sperm can swim.
Sam Wang, the manager of a livestock farm in Taiwan, is a convert.
“Our pregnancy success rate increased by 20 percent after we bought his gadget,” he said.
“In the past, we had to use huge, expensive microscopes and physically count each sperm one by one,” he said.
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