Labor Contractions Timer

[joelevi]

Arn Cota had a pretty decent Labor Timer program that I used with great success when my wife was in labor with our daughter (now 3 years old).

My wife and I are expecting again (July 4th), but now, with my iPaq 4150, Arn's program doesn't work, his email link bounces, and the link to his source-code 404's.

Arn's program had you tap at the start and stop of each contraction, reported their length and frequency, then logged that and allowed the user to export the data to .txt (so the user could show their child what Mom's labor was like, what time she starte, etc. You know, all those things that will help sufficiently embarass her later in life).

The only thing Arn's program didn't do that I had hoped for was to pop an alert when the labor progressed to the "time to go to the hospital" phase.

Has anybody seen such a program that I could use for this pregnancy? Does this sound like something any of you programmers would like to tackle? Arn, are you still out there?

[Dave Potter]

Me, personally? No - because I am not a woman! :D

My wife, on the other hand, might have for our two kids.

[rcobourn]

While I'm not likely to tackle rewriting that program, as I'm (probably) out of the fathering business (3 boys is enough, and if there is to be a fourth, the wife will probably insist on involving some sort of centrifuge process looking for X chromosomes), I want to note one other function this program really needed: a running average of contraction length and interval. Maybe even a graph or other trends analysis.

You could not rely on a software program to tell you when to go to the hospital, as there is too much individual variation. For example, when my wife goes in to labor, it would be safe to fly to Hawaii for a nice weekend on the beach, then return home and visit labor and delivery. With her sister, if her water breaks, you'd better be in the elevator on the way up to the delivery room. 8O

[DrtyBlvd]

I am astonished anyone used such a thing!

She'd'a had my nuts in a sling if I'd had a ppc within 10 feet let alone performing data entry...

Allied to which, neither of my 'Y' Chromos took their sweet time arriving - obviously I'm not the father despite my wifes' assurance to the contrary... :lol: :wink:

[joelevi]

I guess I'm just a lucky guy... my wife and I BOTH have iPaqs, and both use them daily.

My wife's labor usually starts in the middle of the night, and it's hard for either of us to think clearly enough to do the math ourselves... It's nice just to pull out the Pocket PC, tap when it starts... tap when it ends... oh, okay, contraction was 10 second and they're 20 minutes apart...

Of course I'm not looking at a medical-grade program, just something that will pop up and let us know "uh, you know, you'd really better think about heading to the hospital now." (Given, every woman, and every labor is different, so this would just be a lump-sum average, disclaimer supplied, best estimate.)

Personally, I just used Arn's program for "pre-labor" not "hard labor." My wife would have a hard time with me tapping while she was pushing (she'd much rather have me push on her lower back and let her bite me durning her contractions... no, not something I'm looking forward to).

Once we're at the hospital they hook up the wires and get the measurements of contractions with all the charting and all that jazz... but I just need a simple pre-labor tracker...

Any takers?

[Vulcan]

I am astonished anyone used such a thing!

She'd'a had my nuts in a sling if I'd had a ppc within 10 feet let alone performing data entry...

Allied to which, neither of my 'Y' Chromos took their sweet time arriving - obviously I'm not the father despite my wifes' assurance to the contrary... :lol: :wink:

That's exactly what I was thinking!

[CTSLICK]

Hmmmm....probably not. I don't think using a PPC as my wife had contractions would have gone over well. Don't get me wrong...my wife uses a PPC too but still...

Plus, I still have the post-it note that I used to write down the contraction times as we tracked them together. We put it in his scrap book. Couldn't have done that with my PPC. :wink:

[Jeff Rutledge]

Wow, I could have used that last Monday. My wife gave birth to our son on December 8th. I did have my iPAQ with me in the room too (mostly to look up #'s when phoning people with the good news). It would have been kind of neat to use something like this.

Amazing what people come up with for these things eh?

[DrtyBlvd]

(Given, every woman, and every labor is different, so this would just be a lump-sum average, disclaimer supplied, best estimate.)

YMMV sort of thing :lol: :rofl:

[PoweriPaq]

I used the program Labor Timer. Don't know who made it, but it was free. My wife was in labor 4 weeks ago, I used that program to timed the contraction and it helped a lot. I still have the program.

It works on my iPaq 3955 upgraded to WM2003.

Now my son is a month old, wow, that's fast.

[baker]

We have four kids. If we need it, I'll need more than a timer.