Managing Bipolar Moods and Symptoms: A Mood Tracker Review
Now for the good stuff. How do these two apps stack up when compared to one another? Below I give you 1 to 5 ratings in the following areas: dashboard / design, tracking points, user-friendliness, and health reports.
Dashboard / Design
Up!
If you like color and graphics, this app has got a color and a symbol for everything. There’s a color and symbol assigned to each mood and to each event that the app tracks. The main dashboard displays horizontal sections that correspond to each of its tracking points. The top section is a sentence: “I feel _________.” The blank is filled in by the most recent mood that we selected on a given day. Moods range from excited to depressed. The next section is a calendar, with mood on the y-axis, and days of the week on the x-axis. On this calendar, the app graphs our mood, or moods, for each day. There is also a section for sleeping time, working time, activity time, and social activity time.
Each of these sections has an overall progress bar for the day as well as some nested information, meaning that we can click each section and get more detailed information. The first click gives us a day-by-day breakdown of our moods or activity (or non-activity). When we click again, we get even more specific information. For example, the activity section gives us the total time we spent doing some physical activity on a given day. When we click on the section, it tells us how much time we spent walking, running, cycling, or playing sports for each day. When we click again, we can edit the amount of time we spent doing each activity, just in case the app got it wrong.
All of this information can be overwhelming, so I like that the app gives us the option to view it in as little or as much detail as we’d like. However, even at the top level of information, the presentation is a bit busy for my liking. I am a fan of the colors, though.
Overall dashboard / design rating: 4
DBSA
The DBSA dashboard has a visually simple design. The presentation is more like a menu with color-coded buttons that you can press to begin tracking your well-being, symptoms, lifestyle, medication, and health. Or, you can simply press “Begin Tracking” to get started. The app will then guide you through the questionnaire(s) that is associated with each of the categories. The questionnaires are quite thorough, but we can choose whether or not to answer each question. When we are done with each category, we press “Save and Continue” to advance to the next category. From the dashboard, we can also download reports or make changes to our account. This app requires that we create an account in order to use it.
With DBSA, it is not possible to take a “quick glance” at your overall wellness from the dashboard. As far as specificity goes, there are not as many levels of information in the DBSA tracker compared to Up! either. But, there are a lot more tracking points, which I will discuss further in the next section.
Overall dashboard / design rating: 3
Tracking points
Up!
This app utilizes both manual and automatic tracking of its tracking points. The user manually enters her mood, anxiety level, energy level, and self-confidence level. Anxiety, energy, and self-confidence are rated on a scale from -2 to +2; however, the app does not specify what these ratings mean. There is also a place to record whether or not the user has taken her medication for the day and a space to enter notes. The app stores all of these entries as a single diary entry with a date and time (this makes multiple entries for a given day easy to keep track of; it’s also easy to see graphically on the calendar).
After the user has been using the app a while, the app learns what a “normal” mood is for the user. For example, if our mood has been “Ok” for a week, and then the next day our mood jumps to “Excited,” the app will prompt us to enter warning signs of mania, e.g., racing thoughts, not sleeping, or drinking more alcohol. Or, if the next day our mood drops to “Depressed,” the app will prompt us to enter warning signs of depression, e.g., negative thoughts, excessive sleeping, or a change in daily routines. These warning signs are already stored in the app, but the user can change, delete, or add signs in order to best reflect her own personal experience of mania or depression.
The app automatically tracks sleeping time, working time, activity time, and social activity time. The user can enter places that she frequents into the app and define whether that place is home, a place of work, a gym, etc. She also defines whether time spent at that place counts as working, activity, or social activity time. Tracking all the elements of social activity time requires us to enable recording of our phone usage – I opted out of this part. But if you opt in, this feature will also track your calls, messaging, and social media usage…I think.
In my experience with the automatic tracking, it does not get the time spent doing each activity right – ever. Maybe because I am not glued to my phone all the time. It even gets my location wrong, but I am not sure why that is. All in all, the automatic tracking is a nice idea, but it was full of inaccuracies. Yes, we can manually change the time we spend doing each activity, but who has time for or even remembers all of that?
Overall tracking points rating: 2
DBSA
On the dashboard, DBSA indicates whether a category should be tracked daily, weekly, or as needed. Very helpful in my opinion. The app organizes the well-being and symptoms categories into questionnaires. Under Well-Being, there is a place to enter one’s overall mood (from manic to depressed); it even includes “mixed state” as an option. There is also a Well-Being Index. On a scale of all of the time to at no time, the user rates her response to sentences like: “I have felt cheerful and in good spirits” and “My daily life has been filled with things that interest me.” Under Symptoms, the user uses a 0 to 4 scale to rate 17 symptoms that are associated with bipolar disorder and depression.
For the lifestyle category, the user enters information like how much sleep she got or whether she took her medication. Unlike Up! though, this app allows us to track things like alcohol consumption, whether we were on our menstrual period, and whether or not we experienced a significant life event that day – either positive or negative. For the medications category, the user can list medication that she is taking for both mental and physical health as well as any supplements. There’s even a spot to list side effects and their level of severity. And finally, in the health category, the user can track things like her weight, blood pressure, and exercise goals.
What I like about this app, is that it gives you a reason why you should track each of these points, and, even better, how it all relates to your mental health. It also defines all of its rating scales, so it doesn’t leave you guessing about whether you reported your symptoms accurately. There are a lot of points to track, but DBSA makes it very clear that this is a comprehensive, holistic approach to tracking not only your mental health but also your overall wellness.
Overall tracking points rating: 5
User-friendliness
Up!
I’ll make this short. It took me a whole week to figure out that we have to manually change our mood at the top of the page; it does not automatically update based on our anxiety, energy, and self-confidence levels. So why is it all presented on the same page, you ask? Unclear. It is also unclear how the app performs its automatic tracking. Moreover, it takes those extra clicks to get to the page where you can edit what it tracked incorrectly. And even then, the Save button is in an odd position. One would expect it to be at the bottom of the page, after you finish changing the information, but alas, the Save button is hiding in the top right corner.
Overall user-friendliness rating: 1
DBSA
This app literally guides you through the tracking process. It also gives you multiple ways of navigating to the same place. I guess it has to given that there is so much information to keep track of. The DBSA Wellness Tracker has a platform that is user-friendly for just about every user, I would say. It is very clear what you are doing, why you are doing it, and for what date you are doing it.
Overall user-friendliness rating: 5
Health reports
Both of these mood-tracking apps allow us to download PDF reports of all our tracking points. These reports are good if we want to take a look at how we have been doing over a certain period of time, or if we need something to share with our doctor or therapist. I find that a lot of the time it is not easy for me to articulate how I’ve been feeling in the month or more that it takes for me to see my nurse practitioner or therapist again. A report can help us make sure we accurately express to our healthcare provider how we’ve been feeling and even give insights as to why we’ve been feeling that way if we take good notes and/or use all the features that the mood tracker has to offer.
Up!
Up! allows us to easily and immediately download a PDF report that covers either the last two weeks or the last 30 days. The report is very easy to read. Most tracking points are presented as charts, either line or bar graphs.
Overall health reports rating: 5
DBSA
DBSA gives us the option to choose a start and end date for our report. Pressing “Download Report” in the DBSA tracker sends a link to our email. It’s quick, but not quite as immediate as Up!’s download feature. With DBSA, we can also revisit reports that we have downloaded in the past.
This report begins by providing information for both the user and the clinician as far as what is included in the report, how to read it, and how to use it. It’s helpful to a point. Looking at the visuals in this report is a little difficult. It is organized as a grid with the date across the top and the tracking point down the side. We have to scroll to see the whole graph (at least on my cell phone screen), which is annoying and hard to follow. This display of information is not the best if we want to see trends in our daily moods, etc. But, all of the information that you tracked is laid out for us and our clinician to see.
Overall health reports rating: 3
The scores for these tracking apps are close! On average, Up! gets a 3, while the DBSA Wellness Tracker gets a 4. There are plenty more apps out there than just these, but I hope that this review will be a start in helping you figure out what you need and that it shines some light on what mood-tracking apps have to offer. If you have a mood-tracking app that you use, leave the name of it in the comments below as well as some pros and cons if you’d like.
Signed,
Bipolar I
