Reminder: You felt like crap 2 weeks ago

May 1, 2019 1:41 PM

Is there an app / symptom tracker of some kind that does what I feel is a simple task of displaying data in a reasonable way? A hormone tracker without a period?

My chronic illnesses flare with my hormone cycles. I got a hysterectomy (and have 1 ovary) so I can no longer use apps like Clue without a period to track things.*

I would like to enter in symptoms, then be able to refer to them easily on a chart/calendar or something. Like, oh it says I noted "x symptom" 2 weeks ago. I must be in another part of my hormone cycle.

In a sense it doesn't matter. If I feel like crap, I feel like crap. But it would be helpful to know if there's a more noticeable pattern than my general guessing.

*Clue is extremely clunky with additional data. Cara is okay with stomach issues / food triggers specifically but I also find their charts sorta clunky and difficult to use for the type of data I would rather track.

posted by Crystalinne to Health & Fitness (12 answers total)

I don't know if other solutions exist but you could do this pretty easily in Airtable (which I'm recommending over Google Forms because it has more options for viewing the data in different configurations like calendar, etc. without doing a lot of wrangling) You could make a form and keep a link to it on your phone's home screen and then you would have your raw data that you could do whatever you want with.
This is the kind of thing I enjoy doing, I could get it going for you if you want. Anyway, it's an option if none of the existing apps pan out.
posted by bleep at 1:51 PM on May 1, 2019

I use eMoods for this. It's created for (and by) people with bipolar disorder, so some of the default data elements won't be useful to you, but you can remove them pretty easily in the settings. The additional tracking features work really well, and you can track things on ordinal scales (low, medium, high), as binary elements (yes/no), or on a sliding scale (number of times/hours you do something). I track stuff like weather, amount of sleep, medications taken, whether I exercised, in addition to specific illness symptoms.

Daylio is also an OK app for tracking, but it tracks binary elements (did you exercise today or not, etc) and relates them to your overall mood (tracked on an ordinal scale). It's not as granular as a result.
posted by sockermom at 1:52 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

You might find something like Daylio helpful? Or a similar mood tracker, but I do like how you can set all your own activities, and then see how moods correlate with activities.
posted by epersonae at 1:52 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

FWIW, I have daylio set to remind me 4 times a day to get that slightly more granular data.
posted by epersonae at 1:53 PM on May 1, 2019

I have an app called TrackNShare for iOS. I really like it because you can set up your own trackers for whatever you want. It comes with a lot of default ones programmed in but you can really make it your own to track what you want to track and then view it by date, in graphs, etc. You can also export/share the data (if you want to take it to your doctor, for instance.) It's a great little app. I think I started with a free version and liked it enough to buy the paid one.
posted by oblique red at 2:26 PM on May 1, 2019

I use an app called Youper to track anxiety a d depression triggers. It has a lot of nice features including custom tags you can associate with specific emotions. I really really like it. And it's free!!
posted by Hermione Granger at 2:28 PM on May 1, 2019

Flaredown is customizable, and has a nice weather-conditions tracker built-in.
posted by Iris Gambol at 2:38 PM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

There's an app called Symple for iOS that might be able to do this. I haven't used it in so long that I no longer have any data to play with to make sure it does what you want, but it definitely can track tons of things and put them on a calendar for you. You can (if you want) track "factors" - things like exercise, weather, sleep, etc, in addition to "symptoms." You can track up to 5 factors and 5 symptoms for free, I think if you pay it is unlimited. Their built in lists are pretty extensive but if you go into the settings you can add your own if you need to.
posted by misskaz at 2:40 PM on May 1, 2019

Spot On is the "period" tracker from Planned Parenthood. I've been chemically blocking my period for years and I still use it to track my symptoms. It's got great and simple symptom tracking with cute emojis, and doesn't try to cram a bunch of womanhood your womb is a precious bleeding flower shit down your throat. I like it.
posted by phunniemee at 2:49 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

One thing I found frustrating when I was trying to do a similar thing was that apps which displayed data on a calendar didn't make it easy to see periodic patterns of length, say, 24 days. I ended up coding my own (long lost to the dusts of time). Hopefully there's something better now!
posted by wyzewoman at 3:23 PM on May 1, 2019

Take a look at the Habit Bull app -- it has various parameters for setting up "habits" which you might find adaptable to your various symptoms.
posted by BlahLaLa at 3:32 PM on May 1, 2019

I use an app called WomanLog which, gross name, defaults to flowers to show when you’re probably ovulating, pink barf—but! It tracks the days of your cycle and has a very long list of icons to choose from of so many hormone symptoms, from emotional to joint pain to stomach upset, with a range of 1-3 severity. Selected icons for that day show up in the calendar as a mini version, and you can add notes as well.
So if you can handle the ridiculousness of the laaaaady stuff without adding the rage icon every time you open it, it’s a pretty good tracker.
posted by zinful at 8:56 PM on May 1, 2019