The Chronic Illness Symptom Tracker App

Yes, Bearable is a freemium app and our subscription is optional.

With Bearable, you can track unlimited symptoms, treatments, medications, and triggers for free. You can also identify changes in your chronic illness symptoms using weekly reports, timelines, calendars, and charts – all included in the free version of the Bearable app.

Bearable was designed so that people whose disposable income is affected by their chronic illness can still track and manage their health using the app for free. In fact, we’ve recently launched a sponsorship program that gifts free subscriptions to members of the Bearable community every month.

When you first sign-in to Bearable, you’ll be asked to pick the factors that you feel are most effecting your symptoms. Then, over the course of the following week – and along with your symptom severity – you’ll track the days when these factors occur.

Once you’ve collected approximately 7 days of symptoms and factor data, we’ll show you correlations between your factors and changes in symptom severity.

Then, once you’ve collected more data – we recommend at least 30 days – you’ll be able to determine which factors might be negatively impacting your symptoms. At this point, most Bearable users then use this data to:

1. 1. Speak with a Doctor about any new triggers they’ve identified.
   2. Begin making lifestyle changes to avoid newly identified triggers.

It’s also possible to create more granular, custom factors and these can help you to get a more detailed understanding of your triggers. For example, rather than tracking ‘Dairy’ you might begin to track ‘Cheese’, ‘Milk’, and ‘Eggs’.

Ultimately, Bearable gives you the tools to collect data about your triggers, so that you can better understand and manage your symptoms over time.

Many members of the Bearable community have told us that their main aim is to simply track Symptoms over time. The main reasons for this are:

1. 1. It makes it easier spot early warning signs for symptom flare ups.
   2. It helps to give them perspective on the frequency and severity of their symptoms.
   3. The act of logging symptoms gives them a sense of control.
   4. It helps them to stay accountable for managing their symptoms.

Yes, one of the primary reasons we created Bearable was to make communication with your Doctor, Therapist, and Medical team easier.

Whilst it’s possible to export all of your data in .csv format, we’ve also heard from members of the Bearable community that they:

1. 1. Use the share button on certain reports to send doctors a specific report e.g. to share correlations from the Effect on Fatigue report.
   2. Screen grab  reports that don’t currently have a share button e.g. to share symptom trends from the Comparison graph or Timeline screen.
   3. Simply use the app during an appointment to answer questions on the spot. For example, by using the Timeline & Calendar screens to quickly lookup symptom frequency and severity for specific dates.

There are a number of different ways to use Bearable and each of them can help you to manage your symptoms in different ways.

1. 1. By helping you to identify triggers, Bearable can help you to make lifestyle choices and changes to avoid or reduce exposure to these triggers.
      
      
   2. Bearable can help you to identify early warning signs of a symptom flare up, so that you’re able to adjust your plans before your symptoms become more severe.
      
      
   3. Bearable helps you to collect detailed symptom data for you to share with your medical team and this can aid with obtaining a diagnosis or treatment.
      
      
   4. By helping you to understand the positive and negative effects of treatments, self-management, and/or medications on your symptoms. Bearable can help you to make better decisions about how you manage your disease or condition.
      
      
   5. Bearable’s Reminders, Goals, and Other Factor features can help you to stay accountable for healthy habits, self-management, and medication adherence.

Over 90% of Bearable members report that the app helps them to understand their symptoms better and over 75% report that Bearable helps them to feel more in control of their health.

There are a number of ways in which Bearable protects the privacy and security of our member’s data. These include:

1. 1. GDPR Compliance. As a British company we’re compliant with EU data protection laws which are more protective of an individuals data rights than HIPAA. This also means that we do not have to comply with requests for data from US law enforcement.
      
      
   2. We use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to backup and secure your data. GCP is GDPR and CCPA compliant and is certified under major privacy and security standards including ISO 27001 and SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3.
      
      
   3. Your data is encrypted at rest using Google Cloud Platform services. This essentially means that your data is encrypted from your device all the way to the server. In addition to this, Google Cloud also encrypt the infrastructure, platform, and hardware that this data is stored on – so there are multiple layers of encryption protecting your data. These measures are used to protect your data from unauthorised access.
      
      
   4. We will never sell your data and this has been our philosophy since day one. Whilst other companies focus on revenue, our primary focus is to help people to understand and manage their health. This is the same reason we don’t show ads in the app and our only revenue stream is an optional subscription. 
      
      
   5. We collect as little Personally Identifiable Information (PII) as possible. The only information needed to create a Bearable account is your email address. That means no name, no home address, no credit card information, no biometrics, no birthdate, and nothing else that could be used to personally identify you directly or indirectly. The only instance in which phone number data may be collected is if you choose to create an account using your Facebook/Meta account.
      
      
   6. Most importantly, you have complete control of your data at all times and from within the app. From the settings screen, you’re able to delete your account and/or data at any time.

If you have any questions or concerns about your data privacy, please contact us at support@bearable.app

What we’ve been told by our community of thousands of people with multiple chronic illnesses and hard-to-diagnose-conditions, is that Bearable is better than other chronic illness symptom tracker apps because:

1. 1. The app is made by people with chronic conditions for people with chronic conditions. Bearable started as an idea on Reddit – by our founder and CEO who lives with chronic migraines – and was shaped by the feedback of chronic illness communities such as r/chronicillness, r/fibromyalgia, r/endo, r/migraine, r/longcovid, r/anxiety and many more. Bearable is still recommended by these communities today and we continue to work with them for feedback on features and updates to the app.
      
      
   2. Bearable is more customisable than other chronic illness symptom tracker apps. Our approach has always been to let people dictate what and how they track their health and the factors impacting their health. Rather than taking a prescriptive approach, Bearable let’s you track and manage your health however you’d like.
      
      
   3. Bearable has a simple interface that makes tracking symptoms, treatments, and medication very quick, easy, and rewarding. Everything appears on a single screen that can be customised as much or as little as you’d like.
      
      
   4. Most of the features can be used for free and we don’t show ads or sell any data. If you read reviews of the Bearable App, you’ll notice that people often mention how much they were able to achieve for free. Our mission has always been and will always be to help as many people with chronic illnesses as possible and that’s why we do everything we can to protect user data and offer tools for free (we even offer free subscriptions through the Bearable Heroes program).
      
      
   5. Bearable is backed by scientific review, recommended by Doctors and Therapists including; Psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Levinson, GP Dr Claire Ashley, and also recommended by The US Pain Foundation, and a number of leading health publications including SELF Magazine, Healthline, and WebMD.

You can read more about how Bearable compares to other leading Symptom and Mood trackers (like Careclinic and Daylio) and reviews of the app from people with BPD, ADHD, and Bipolar Disorder on our blog and user stories pages.