Each evening, Visible wants you to record your symptoms and activity for the day.

The Evening Check-in functionality is also available in the free version of the app.

This is part of a longer review of the Visible Plus app.

Symptoms

In the setup you choose what symptoms you want to track. For each symptom, you record how you felt at its worst during the day. The choices are

• None
• Mild
• Moderate
• Severe

It comes with several common long COVID symptoms, but you can also add your own custom symptoms.

After I used it a while, I realized that for the symptom “fatigue” I had to think about what that really means. For example, if I’m in bed all day, but actually feel good, is that “none” or “severe?” Likewise, if I was very active and expected to be tired and was, is that “severe?” I finally decided to record how I felt, regardless of what I did since there is a separate recording of activity.

I also had trouble because the scale is not absolute, which makes it harder to see progress over time. For example, on the standardized pain scale, 0 is no pain and 10 is the worst pain you have ever had. What I found over time is that my concept of “mild” or “severe” changed, which made the data recorded less useful. Also, there were several times I want to record small improvements, but since there are only four choices, I couldn’t do that.

The symptom tracking is fast and simple, but possibly too simplistic.

Exertion

The second screen in the evening check-in is exertion. For each area (physical, mental, emotional, social), you can choose

• None
• A little
• Somewhat
• A lot

I had the same problem here with the symptom scales. My concept of “a lot” has changed over time, which makes it more difficult to show progress.

Crash and Notes

The last page asked if you crashed today and allows you to record notes about your day. In the notes I recorded what I did that day, which was very useful.

Reports

Once you have recorded data for a few days, you can see nice trend graphs and can compare two different fields. For example, I was able to see that when my emotional exertion was high, then I was more likely to crash two days later.

Conclusion

The Evening Check-in works and is easy to use. The data collection I didn’t find that great, especially when there are well-known standards like the 0-10 pain scale. However, I spent some energy with a foggy brain trying to come up with a better mechanism for tracking and I could not.