How Your Phone Can Improve Your Health

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We use smartphones for many purposes. Why don’t we use mobile technology to improve our own health? We often hear about the addiction to electronic devices, but here you can find how technology can help you to lead a healthy lifestyle.

A smartphone can help remotely monitor important indicators (for example, monitor blood glucose levels) and save money on medical services. Besides, you can monitor your health with the help of online diaries, calendars, and other “smart” applications that can not only store but also analyze data about our body.

With the help of these health-conscious apps, you can easily stay connected to your body at the touch of a button.

Personal Medical Record: ONDOC

This smartphone program is much better than a personal medical record, which is stored in your clinic. Due to its online option, the medical record will always be with you in case of need. Besides, the application stores the most important indicators of your body (weight, height, pulse, physical activity).

The service is personalized so that after filling out the questionnaire, it will provide you with analytics of your health, instruct you of the existing risks, and select the ways to avoid them. The user can also save important data: diagnoses, information about allergies, vaccinations, contraindications, time of taking medications, etc.

Nutrition and Sports: MyFitnessPal

This service is much more than just a calorie counter. The smart application MyFitnessPal gradually learns your eating habits, takes into account the personal needs of users (for example, whether you want to try a low-carb diet), and creates an individual dietary profile. It is easy to get information about what you have eaten in two clicks, by searching the database of hundreds of millions of foods and dishes, and sometimes just by scanning barcodes in stores.

You can also keep track of your daily physical activity synchronizing the application with another fitness service. Apple HealthKit, Samsung Health, Garmin, and FitBit are just right. Then MyFitnessPal will be able to adjust the profile and nutritional recommendations, taking into account the level of intensity of your loads.

Mental Health: Happify

It allows you to track mood and emotional well-being, analyze dynamics, and identify impulses for disturbing thoughts. But most importantly, the application helps not to distance yourself from psychological problems and anxieties, but to work them out with the help of simple and quick exercises in a playful way. The methodology for “improving well-being” Happify is based on scientific research in the field of psychology of happiness. But the developers warn that using the application cannot replace psychotherapy and medical treatment of clinical conditions, but to help a little better know yourself and find new ways to cheer up.

Sleep Quality: Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock

By importance for health, sleep is on a par with nutrition and physical activity and affects the functioning of all body systems. A full sleep normalizes the functioning of the brain and heart, helps fight stress, improves digestion, and generally makes our life much better. To sleep well, and wake up easily, you can set a smart alarm clock Sleep Cycle.

SleepCycle is an intelligent alarm clock that analyzes your sleep and wakes you up in the fastest phase of sleep. It makes it easy to wake up effortlessly. The application monitors movements during sleep using the phone’s accelerometer. Then it determines the most suitable time to wake you up for a 30-minute interval, the end of which falls on the set alarm time.

Launch the application, set the half-hour time period in which you need to wake up, and put the phone next to the bed at the level of your body (for example, on a nightstand or stool). Through the smartphone’s speaker, Sleep Cycle will listen and analyze your sleep behavior, reveal the phases of a short and deep sleep, and help you wake up at the moment when the body will be the easiest to do it. The application has visual sleep statistics and tips for optimizing it.

Medication: Medisafe

Medisafe helps you take medications, dietary supplements, vitamins, and birth control pills on time. This is not just an alarm clock, but a complete electronic first aid kit. You can set specific parameters – how many tablets, how, when and during what period you need to drink. It also creates a family account for taking vitamins and make separate lists of effective “situational” medications (for abdominal pain, allergies, and so on). In addition, Medisafe can be synchronized with health monitoring devices and track how pills affect your well-being.

Menstrual Cycle: Clue – Women’s Calendar

“Without flowers, butterflies, euphemisms or pink” – this is how developers position their application for women. Clue provides a very convenient minimalistic monthly tracker, an ovulation calculator, and a mood diary. In the application, you can fix your weight, skin condition, and other physical and psychological parameters on different days of the cycle. Clue will analyze the data, remind you of the approach of PMS, menstruation, and the use of birth control pills. All data can be saved as an infographic and shown to your gynecologist.

A nice bonus: the application has a lot of useful scientific and medical information about a woman’s health with links to sources.

Symptom Check: Babylon

The Babylon app checks the symptoms of various diseases. A team of AI experts is trying to create the world’s largest medical knowledge database that can diagnose illnesses and even give you treatment recommendations via telephone. Babylon maximally systematizes the process of diagnosis and subsequent treatment of the patient. All you need to do is to upload information about their symptoms to the application. The system, based on your medical history, will offer suitable treatment. Impressively, the company claims that Babylon’s diagnostics now have 92 percent accuracy.

Heart Rate Monitoring: Runtastic

The Runtastic Heart Rate Monitor allows you to check your heart function just by showing the tip of your finger to the camera. The application measures the pulse at rest and the pulse before and after exercise, and it shows the maximum heart rate. So, with this tonometer, you can easily judge the physical and emotional state.

Enhancing Heart Performance Assessment: Welltory

Welltory will help you plan your day, increase your resistance to stress, and properly recover from your workout. The application does not just track the heartbeat through the camera but conducts analysis to quantify the level of stress and overall health. Not just a pulse is measured, but heart rate variability (HRV). HRV reflects the balance of the nervous system and the level of accumulated stress. Hence, Welltory shows which factors (sleep, exercise, nutrition, work, and even weather) affect your well-being.

The intensity of sports, the pulse, the quality of sleep, the number of steps taken per day – smartphones have learned to record and analyze and systematize these indicators. Many applications have appeared that help you track and control your lifestyle, so tracking your health today has become much easier. Thus, knowing how to use your smartphone to improve your health can make a healthier you easier than ever.

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