Amazon's secret project tracking fertility collapses
The ability to conceive, which is in both men and women, is called 'fertility.' It turns out that a top-secret Amazon project to develop a device to monitor fertility and assist in infertility treatment at home has collapsed.
Amazon shuts down secret project to develop fertility tracker
According to CNBC, Amazon had been working on a fertility monitoring device and smartphone app for the past four years as part of a project called 'Encore.' However, in October 2024, the project team was ordered to disband and the team members were laid off.
Originally, Encore was a project that started when Amazon acquired a startup called BluDiagnostics, sources said. The startup was working on developing a device that would allow women to track their own fertility by testing their saliva at home to measure the important hormones estradiol and progesterone. After Amazon acquired the company, it continued to develop its own saliva collection device, and also developed an app that records data such as menstrual symptoms and sexual activity to improve the accuracy of pregnancy.
In 2014, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon at the time, launched a plan called the Grand Challenge to fix risky internal projects that were uncertain whether they would ever see the light of day. The Grand Challenge was a way to focus on development even if it meant wasting funds along the way, and it is said that this led to the successful development of the Alexa-enabled glasses 'Echo Frames.' Encore was one of the projects that was the subject of the Grand Challenge.
Other Grand Challenge projects included the remote medical service ' Amazon Care ,' a video chat device for children, a virtual tour service, and an augmented reality headset for meetings, but all of these have been canceled. At the time of writing, only one project remains, which according to a person involved is 'focused on medical technology.'
Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan confirmed the existence of Encore and the layoffs, saying about 100 employees would be leaving the project. 'We regularly review our operations, and after a recent review, we have decided to discontinue the Encore project within the Grand Challenge,' Callahan said.
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