How health tracking helps people with a chronic illness

A 2019 study of patients with Parkinson’s disease, a chronic neurological condition, identified that health tracking provided patients with deeper insights into their own unique experience with the condition, helped them self-advocate for their health, and seemed to improve their communication with healthcare professionals.

Human Health is a mobile app specifically designed with the complex needs of patients with chronic conditions in mind. We’ve made it easy for our users to track the impact of their symptoms every day, and how these symptoms change over time.

Making health tracking easier

Some patients report that it can be tricky to know what to track and how to track, as well as finding they become obsessed with or burdened by the activity of tracking their health information.

The Human Health app was created with the aim to reduce this burden, and to make the experience of keeping an accurate record of your health journey as painless as possible.

Personalizing your symptom tracking

By adjusting how often you want to track each of your symptoms, you can tailor your daily check-in survey to only record the symptoms that affect you on most days.

You’ll still be able to see ‘only sometimes’ symptoms in your profile under ‘Medical info’, and you can use the Global Add button to log a new impact rating for these symptoms when they do happen.

You can also easily add any new symptoms that you haven’t logged before from this page as well.

Choosing to personalize your symptom tracking frequency also changes how your insights charts are presented, so you can get a more accurate picture of how your ‘only sometimes’ symptoms are affecting you. You can read more about this in a separate blog post here.

Track in ways that work for you

This post is a guide to help you understand the features available to you within the Human Health app. We’re here to support you by helping you advocate for your health and understand how your symptoms affect you. If you find tracking your symptoms a certain way works better for you, please continue to do so.

How do I decide what to track ‘most days’ and ‘only sometimes’?

Tracking ‘only sometimes’ symptoms as individual events when they happen reduces the time your check-in takes. It might also help make communication with your healthcare practitioner clearer, if they can see which symptoms you’re rating every day and which you only need to record when they flare up.

For example, someone with arthritis may choose to rate the impact of their “joint stiffness” in their check-in, because they wake up feeling this on most days. They may then individually log symptoms like “knee pain” or “wrist pain” as they happen, depending on how their condition is impacting certain joints at that point in time.

We believe that the best way to track your health journey is the way that works best for you — this article is only a guide. Human puts you in the drivers seat, so that you can understand how your symptoms impact you, putting you in a position to better advocate for your health.

Resources

1. National Cancer Institute Dictionary of Cancer Terms. Chronic Disease. Available at: https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/chronic-disease
2. Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care. About Chronic Conditions. Available at: https://www.health.gov.au/topics/chronic-conditions/about-chronic-conditions
3. Riggare S, Scott Duncan T, Hvitfeldt H, Hägglund M. "You have to know why you're doing this": a mixed methods study of the benefits and burdens of self-tracking in Parkinson's disease. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2019 Aug 30;19(1):175. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6716928/

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