Managing a chronic illness can be difficult. There are many different medications to take (often at different times), appointments to remember, symptoms to keep track of, and lots of information to absorb. Thankfully, living in a digital age means that there are numerous mobile apps that can help you manage your chronic illness.
We’ve put together a list of some of the best mobile apps for managing your chronic illness:
Medisafe is an app that helps patients manage medications. It helps with dosage and reminds you when you need to take your meds, increasing adherence rates. The information can also be shared with your healthcare team and pharmacy.
Pain Diary works for anyone with a chronic illness. It allows patients to chart and score pain as well as record and track other symptoms of the disease such as fatigue and mood swings. This app also has a feature where patients can connect with others living with the same chronic illness and swap best practices.
ZocDoc is a handy app if you’ve recently been diagnosed with a chronic illness, since one of the first things you’ll need to do is find a doctor to treat you. ZocDoc allows you to search for local specialist doctors who are approved by your insurance company. The app will even tell you when the doctor is available to see you.
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My Medical Info is an app that stores all your relevant health history and insurance details. This makes filling out those endless forms a little less challenging, since you won’t have to rely on your memory for all the details. The app will also allow you to program in doctors’ appointments and all the medications you’re taking.
Fooducate helps you keep track of your diet and make healthy choices. Eating well is an integral part of managing any chronic illness and this app will help you to eat the right foods and get you to a healthy body weight. You can program in how many calories you want to consume a day and then add in the food choices you make, the app will work out the nutritional values of everything you eat and tell you how many calories you’ve consumed. It also works in conjunction with many fitness apps to add in details of any physical activities and calories burned.
Sleep Cycle helps you get the best out of your sleep. The app analyzes how much sleep and the quality of sleep you get each night and you can also have the alarm set to wake you when you’re in your lightest sleep, leaving you feeling less groggy and more refreshed each day.
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Or, you can use a plain notepad and pen to keep track of your meds taken, food eaten, symptoms for that day, etc. Works great for me! I keep mine in my bathroom, where I know I’ll see it multiple times a day.
“Manage My Pain Pro” is a useful app for tracking Fibro pain, or other chronic illness issues. Best feature is that you can have it on multiple devices, and it syncs across all of them automatically. Most of these programs have editable fields, so you can add your own issues that you want to track.
“My Pain Diary” includes the weather with each report, so you can track health changes due to environment. Quite useful at times…
These apps issue reports that you can carry to your doctor’s visit for a summary of your health issues over time…
Notepads are certainly fine, but since I have to carry a smart phone around with me all the time so my wife doesn’t fret, the apps are certainly convenient for my use.
As the technologies are covering most phases of life, but at some point we have to avoid their extra use. Just like these chronic illnesses managements, they ought to be only used as a schedule reminder. Hence, illnesses should be managed by medical experts.
Yes, but accurate data tracking can help medical experts understand the complex interactions of triggers, symptoms, environment, etc.. and know how best to help one manage a condition. Don’t underestimate the power of data analytics!