Visible, the app to monitor the long covid

Like many sufferers of long covidHarry Leeming has spent the last two years having his symptoms labeled either a vivid imagination or the result of an anxiety disorder. From this frustration and the need to help those in the same situation was born Visiblean app that serves precisely “to make the effects of long covid visible”, first of all to patients but also to doctors and researchers.

Calibrate fatigue. Leeming, a young engineer who lives between London and San Francisco, worked with a team of health professionals to create the app, which aims to make the daily life of those suffering from long covid more manageable, for example by helping to dose the physical effort. One of the consequences of long covid is in fact the sharpening of symptoms after sport: «It doesn’t happen immediately after physical effort – explains Harry, who was an experienced cyclist and climber before long covid – but hours or even days later. Precisely because the feedback arrives so late, it is very difficult to understand if you are overdoing the exercise».

Under control (or almost). Visible, available for free in the beta versionallows you to check symptoms from a morning and evening list, monitor sleep quality, enter data on the menstrual cycle and other biometric parameters such as heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), measured by placing a finger behind the lenses of the smartphone camera.

Heart rate is not fixed but increases or decreases naturally in response to a series of psychophysical parameters; therefore, heart rate variability is usually an indicator of good health. However, various research shows that it is attenuated in people with long covid o chronic fatigue syndromeand that it is a reliable index of fatigue.

Take action in advance. After a few days of monitoring the parameters, patients can begin to notice if there is a physiological trend of their symptoms, to understand when they worsen and eventually to stop before they can get any worse. In short, it is possible change your lifestyle to prevent excessive kickback: unlike fitness apps that encourage users to work harder, Visible helps stop in time.

“In the future, we’d like to get to predict when symptoms flare up so we can warn users earlier and give them a larger window of time to practice,” says Lemming, who just received a million-dollar grant to improve your app.

Grasping an invisible disease. Recording the symptoms of long covid Visible should also help make this disease less abstract in the eyes of doctors; and the sharing of anonymised data could be useful in the search for treatments. If, for example, a link were to be found between the worsening of certain disorders and a given phase of the menstrual cycle, it would mean that hormones influence the symptoms and that hormonal contraceptives could be used to mitigate them. For users, then, finally seeing their ailments legitimized could be liberating: the goal is to provide better control of the disease on several levels, starting from the individual one.