| BabyStart- The BabyStart kit is a simple, inexpensive way to get a quick sense of male fertility. It is designed to determine if the sample contains more than 20 million sperm per milliliter. You cannot determine anything about motility or morphology with the BabyStart kit. It is designed to be an initial screening test. Frankly, this test gets mixed reviews. Some people love it because it is easy to use and inexpensive. Others hate it because they find it easy to ruin the test by making a mistake and they find the color change difficult to interpret. I hesitate to recommend it because if you have good counts but poor motility you will not know that you have poor motility when you use this test.
Fertell- The Fertell test kit includes both a male and a female fertility test. The female test measures the level of Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) in urine. FSH is an indicator of Ovarian Reserve, a measure of the age of your ovaries and their ability to respond to FSH in order to produce eggs capable of fertilization.
The really unique thing about Fertell is the male test. The male fertility test determines if the concentration of progressively motile sperm is greater than 10 million/mL. This is the cutoff level for normal fertility as suggested by the World Health Organization.
For sperm to fertilize an egg they must be healthy and swimming well. In the Fertell test the sperm must swim through a chemical solution that mimics cervical fluid before they are counted. The sperm that make it through this solution are colored red and form a line. Even a faint red line means that there are more than 10 million motile sperm per milliliter.
Micra- The Micra is small, 200 power microscope. For it's size the microscope works well. It is well designed and the lenses are of good quality. The illumination is good. You can clearly see sperm with the Micra. The directions are a bit brief, only a bit more than a single 8 1/2 by 11 inch page. Bare in mind that the sperm look pretty small when viewed at 200X. This is why we rated the Micra as fair for morphology.
We said above that the kit would do 2 to 10 tests. The kit includes two sample "trays," two bottles diluent, two reusable polycarbonate slides, and 10 cover slips.
Kokopelli Technologies Home Semen Analysis Kits- Kokopelli Technologies' kits were designed for couples where the man is doing something to improve his fertility and wishes to observe changes over time. The kits were designed to make a couple proficient at doing professional quality semen analysis in their own home. Of course, you can still have a quick look whenever you wish.
Kokopelli Technologies kits include a high quality microscope, all the supplies you will need, and comprehensive instructions so you can confidently do your own semen analysis at home. Kokopelli Technologies Standard Home Semen Analysis Kit includes a prepared slide of stained human sperm so you can become proficient with a microscope before you collect a sample. The kit also includes a bottle of Sperm Sized Spheres containing 20 million spheres per mL. You use this solution to test your ability to count sperm so you have confidence in your technique. The kit also includes Standard Depth Slides. These slides have a fixed sample depth so you get accurate sperm counts.
Plasma Sperm- The Plasma Sperm microscope is sold by Kanojotoys, a Japanese company that specializes in sex toys. You can order it from Japan online. The $128 price includes shipping to the US. We found it to be a complete waste of money. (Please contact us if you would like to buy the one we tested.) The instructions are entirely in Japanese. The microscope has 100, 600, and 1200 power. We tested it using our Stained Sperm Slide. We could just make out the stained sperm using 100X. We could not see anything, except optical imperfections, at either 600X or 1200X. |
