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In the febrile world of health startups, entrepreneurs are racing to quantify every possible bodily and environmental function. And so if we can monitor air quality, sleep and heart rate, why wouldn’t we monitor sperm quality as well?
In May, America’s Food and Drug Administration approved Trak, a new “male fertility testing” system. It looks like a cross between a frisbee, a clock and a Cuisinart blender. The Trak website announces that it is “like a Fitbit for sperm”.
Could it really change how men view their reproductive health? The first step might be reminding men to think about their reproductive health at all.
Even in 2016, conversations about the “biological clock” tend to assume that fertility is an exclusively female concern. Women joke about “dying eggs”, but it is rare to hear a man joke about his “dying sperm”.
Yet a substantial body of clinical research shows that the ability for a couple to conceive correlates directly with sperm count, defined as the number of sperm that a male partner’s body produces. That number tends to correlate with other...