The last year or so have seen an ever expanding range of mobile apps that not only track various aspects of your health, but apply analytical insights to alert you of potential problems looming around the corner.
Whilst many of these alerts are for serious conditions such as heart attacks or strokes, there is a growing band of services for less serious, yet still rather debilitating conditions, such as migraines.
Stopping migraines in their tracks
Migraine Buddy is a new app developed by Healint that claims to be able to accurately predict when a migraine might be coming on. The app monitors the user and their surroundings before applying its algorithm to predict, with 90 percent accuracy, whether a headache is looming.
The app begins by asking you a series of questions about the kind of migraines you suffer from, your lifestyle and any medication you currently take. It also collects data from you in areas such as your sleep and movement courtesy of the sensors built in to your phone.
Once it has a decent amount of data on you, it provides you with a report informing you when symptoms occurred, and what the main triggers were. It also provides you with what it believes to be the most effective treatment, with the recommendation also data driven based upon your response to treatments in the past.
“It mimics how a doctor prescribes different medication to patients to figure out what works,” the founders say. “Most other migraine apps are not as comprehensive. We collect data that’s action-driven, so that we can help patients make the right decisions.”
It’s a pretty cool app for a number of reasons. Firstly, migraines are one of the most common health issues experienced by people, so it’s serving a really valuable need. Migraines are also one of those conditions that are difficult to pin down exactly what causes them, so this data driven approach could help us to modify our lifestyles and hopefully suffer fewer migraines as a result.
Migraine Buddy is available on iOS for $2.99, and you can learn more about it via the video below.
That's pretty clever. It's impressive how far these kind of predictive technologies have come in a relatively short space of time.
Aye, it certainly is Nick. It will be fascinating to see how things evolve over the next few years.
Interesting idea. I've always suffered terribly from migraines so will have to check this out.
Let us know how you get on Anita.
This is a really interesting app. My wife suffers from migraines and will definitely find this useful, thank you for posting!