Pregnant? Monitor The Baby With Fetal Growth.

It doesn’t cost much to get pregnant. The payments are deferred. Now I can track my baby’s growth progress with a free Mac application that monitors fetal growth. It’s called Fetal Growth. Cool doesn’t have to be creative.

What you get when you’re pregnant is body change, sometimes rapid body change, advice from everyone on how great it will be. Or not.

What you don’t get is an organized way to monitor your baby’s growth progress. Until you try out Fetal Growth. This nifty freeware application is just what the doctor ordered.

What you get is a Mac application which tracks and graphs information about your baby and you. Exam dates. Biparietal diameter. Head circumference. Abdominal circumference. Femur length.

These stats are all plotted and tracked against typical gestation. Are you nauseous just thinking about all that? Me, too.

Fetal Growth is an excellent application that can be used by obstetricians, midwives, radiologists, general practitioners, or anyone, including mommys-to-be, involved in pregnancy care.

Fetal Growth maintains a database of individual patient files, so it’s good for the doctor or nurse and is beneficial for many patients.

As you’d expect from a classy Mac application, Fetal Growth exports graphics as JPEG files so they can be printed, saved, put up on a web site (the family and friends will love that).

The software is designed by David Davies-Payne and Rita Teele. Just so you know there’s more to life and medical information tracking than pregnancy (unless you’re already pregnant—then you know better), they have other Mac applications for the medical professional or the medically curious.

For example, Renal Growth 3.1 is a Mac OS X application which stores data from birth to 13 years.

This is a great application to assist radiologists, renal physicians, and pediatric doctors to plot data and compare measurements against norms for age and weight.

I’ve got three months to go and I’m rather certain that King Kong will get a new relative. I can only imagine what my child will look like in 13 years.

Adding to the suite of Mac applications is Bone Age 2.1 which calculates and monitors skeletal maturity in your child.

No, it won’t calculate mental maturity. My younger brother would never register on such a device.

Bone Age is a Mac application that assesses bone age and sature (physical vs. in-the-community) related to reference standards.

These same medical professionals have another application called CF Score 2.1 which plots cystic fibrosis using the well-known Brasfield method.

Scores are plotted over time using air trapping, linear markings, lesions, and general severity.

Can you use all the medical applications on your Mac at home? Yes. That’s the point. They’re free and they’re Mac applications for the medical community.

And you thought everything in the doctor’s office was Windows only? Me, too.

All these Mac applications are somewhat specialized. I have a ‘partner’ in this production who’s only interested in the sonogram and doesn’t care much for charts and graphs.

Obviously, your mileage may vary.

Tera Patricks
Congratulations, Alex. A new Mac mini for the family.

Bambi Hambi
I’ve received a few dozen email messages in the past few months asking why we don’t show your photograph on the site. Sorry. I don’t have a wide angle lens.

Carol Mary Miller
I never knew such applications were available for the Mac. Good dig, Alex.