What are all the different scales used in Bearable?

The Mood & Energy sections use a 1 to 10 scale. Unlike the symptoms section, these are both single metrics, and so we felt it made sense to allow a greater range for them as the potential for overwhelm is much lower.

The Symptoms section uses a 0 to 4 scale (none, mild, moderate, severe, and unbearable). We chose this scale because for people with multiple health conditions, each with multiple symptoms, showing repeated 0 to 10 scales became overwhelming. 

The Health Measurements section uses customisable ratings which can incorporate anything from 0 to 20k steps, a 0 – 10 pain scale, blood pressure readings, heart rate measures, etc. 

The Bowel Movements section uses the Bristol Stool chart (type 1 to type 7), which is a widely used clinical scale that represents different types of Bowel Movement (e.g. lumpy, smooth, watery, etc.)

The Sleep Quality and Custom Ratings sections both use a 1 to 5 scale. For custom ratings, this was chosen so that, for someone with many custom ratings, the section wouldn’t become overwhelming. This is different to the severity scale used in the symptoms section, which only measures the worsening of a symptom, because custom ratings can be used for positive measures (e.g. Productivity). For sleep quality, this was chosen so as not to dominate the Sleep section with e.g. a 10-point scale or a clinical 28 question survey. 

Note. If you’d like to track Sleep Quality using a more granular scale, e.g. 0 to 10 or even 0 to 100, you can do so by creating a custom Health Measurement. Remember to select ‘next day’ in the Impacts tab if you want to view which factors correlate with changes in this metric.

Within the Other Factors section, it’s possible to create Binary factors, which you can select if the Factor happened vs. didn’t happen or Variable scales, which you can select if you want to log the amount that something happened. There are two types of Variable scale, ‘little to a lot’ and ‘low to high’. Variable scales allow you to view correlations between the amount by which a factor occurred (e.g. lots of coffee) and how it impacts changes in symptom severity. This is helpful when, for example, identifying your tolerance level for something such as the amount of caffeine you can consume before your sleep is negatively impacted.