5 Apps For Symptom Diary & Health Journaling (2020) - Teamscope

Intro

“How satisfied are you with your physical health in the past four weeks?”. Knowing how a patient is feeling, what their symptoms are, and if they experienced any changes is often essential information to healthcare professions and clinicians alike. The use of patient diaries, or symptom trackers, can offer valuable insight into any range of symptoms and assist in making more informed decisions about a diagnosis or treatment based or recognise symptom fluctuations accompanying a new drug. 

Depending on the clinicians or the research, self-reported questions on symptom tracking can vary immensely both in detail and time. Doctors will frequently ask their patients to keep a diary for recent health events, such as pain, fatigue and quality of life over the last 24 hours, the previous week, or the last month. The timeline of these symptoms can be analysed together with new treatment regimens or lifestyle modifications to gain valuable insight into a patient’s response. 

So what are our options for symptom trackers? How can we also promote self-management from the patient’s side to take more charge of their health? In the past, we have relied on pen, paper, and a good memory. The downsides to these diaries and methods however often lead to low adherence, misplacement, and time consuming analysis. By shifting these diaries to the small buzzing electrical devices we all carry in our pocket, we can remind patients to answer at predefined times, we can create backups of the data, and instantly analyse it. 

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What is a digital symptom tracker?

A digital symptom tracker is a computer software that allows a person or patient to self-report medical events and track what they felt and when it happened.

Traditionally patients have used paper booklets to track their symptoms. Paper logs have many upsides, they work anywhere, don’t require extra devices (beyond a pen), and they never run out of batteries. But this also means they can be misplaced or lost anywhere, without a backup, and the processing of paper diaries and notes also has its obstacles ; interpreting handwriting can lead to mistakes and data analysis is not instant. 

To cope with the challenges of pen and paper data collection doctors and researchers have been using digital symptom trackers for decades.

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With the advent of the smartphone, virtually anyone carries in their pocket a powerful note-taking device. App-based diaries ensure that entries can happen anywhere, anytime and can be coupled with push notifications to ensure measurements are not missed. 

Key features to look for in a health journal app

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1. Data protection

Data security is a crucial feature of these sorts of systems. Although any app with annotation or data collection capabilities may seem fit for tracking our health, there are essential data protection features that must be regarded when using a mobile app for tracking our health. 

An example of the standard security features that a health journal app should have is passcode locking. If someone finds a smartphone with medical data, they should enter a passcode to unlock it, even if the smartphone has a general passcode enabled. 

Also, the data should be stored locally encrypted. If the device is lost, this will mitigate the risk of someone gaining unlawful access to that data. 

Clinicians and patients should look into what standards and regulations the mobile application they want to use complies with, such HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11 (FDA) and Good Clinical Practice.

2. Data sharing and remote access

One of the benefits that a health journal app has over paper is the ability to visualize the data and share it with others quickly. Not all mobile apps store data in the cloud, some only locally. 

Assure that you choose an app that is capable of providing remote access to the data and that even if the device would be lost, the data can be retrieved. If you are doing clinical research, check that the data can be exported in CSV or SPSS and with enough metadata that other researchers could possibly use it in the future.

3. Data collection versatility 

Logging symptoms is all about capturing qualitative and quantitative data. In practice, this means creating a form with variables and fields. The complexity of your questionnaire will depend on the kind of data you want to collect. In some cases, advanced features might be required such as branching logic (a new page or question appears dependent on the answer of a previous one), automatic calculations, image and video capture.

Make sure the app you want to use will be able to handle the kind of symptom data you want to keep track of.

4. Reminders and push notifications

Making data collection a habit is no easy task, with the many distractions that patients have they will likely forget to enter data. Increasing engagement and adherence can be aided by push notification that remind a patient when to check their blood pressure or answer a set of questions on how they are feeling.