Inventing the first app in the world to be approved as a contraceptive started as a hobby project for Elina Berglund Scherwitzl.

The nuclear physicist, who'd been working on the team that discovered the Higgs boson, was tired of using hormonal contraception but wasn't ready to have a baby.

So the Swede set about using her data skills to find an alternative.

Like many women I had tried many different contraception options since my teenage years and hadn't really found a solution that fit me," she explains.

"It was in my quest for an effective natural alternative that I discovered that you can see when you're fertile by your temperature, and for me that was really a revelation."

She was so pleased with the results that, together with her Austrian husband, fellow physicist Raoul Scherwitzl, she set about founding her own business called Natural Cycles.

It offers an app designed to help women around the world with their fertility and contraception needs, by allowing them to collect their own temperature data sets and closely monitor their cycle trends.

Read the source article at BBC - Homepage