If not for the gravitas of a Food and Drug Administration approval, the Yo Home Sperm Test might seem like a punchline lifted from a late-night TV monologue. A do-it-yourself male fertility test kit with “motile sperm concentration” results, including your own swimming-sperm video, delivered by a smartphone app?
YO! Well, this mostly serious mobile sperm test was developed by Medical Electronic Systems, which for 20 years has manufactured commercial-grade automated semen analyzers used in hospitals and labs. It’s calling the test kit the first using a smartphone and video, FDA-approved, to measure the number of moving (motile) sperm, a prime indicator in determining male infertility.
“If a man is producing 100 million sperm and they are all dead or not swimming,” says Marcia Deutsch, Medical Electronic Systems’ chief executive officer, “it’s useless to know your sperm concentration is ‘normal.’ The key is to assess sperm that are moving, as these are the sperm that will fertilize an egg during normal conception.”
The YO kit, available in two weeks at $49.95, includes a mini-microscope that clips over a smartphone camera and two test slides. Here, it starts sounding a little more like a laboratory and less like a fratboy gag. The slide, with sperm sample, is inserted into the clip-on microscope over the smartphone camera, which then records and displays sperm activity within two minutes as the YO app analyzes it and provides the results. (While you wait, the app entertains with “sperm trivia.”) Deutsch says Medical Electronic Systems tested the technology for four years and that results, assuming instructions were followed properly, proved more than 97 percent accurate in FDA studies that included 316 participants.
The male-fertility test kit, because it’s an over-the-counter product, cannot show actual sperm count. Instead, it gives “low” or “moderate/normal” readings based on World Health Organization guidelines. For anyone serious about male fertility testing, it’s only a first step. Check with your doctor. After the swimming-sperm test, you’ll need a professional to determine how many sperm are shaped normally. Sperm morphology, the size and shape of sperm, is an important element of semen analysis. Normal sperm have an oval head and a long tail. It will take more than an app and a clip-on microscope to determine male infertility.
For more information on male infertility, visit the Tallwood Urology & Kidney Institute.