Crono Care Coach Features

Get insight into your condition(s), balance in your life

Crono Care Coach is developed to help you gain insight into your chronic condition(s) by tracking how you're doing daily. This allows you to discover patterns, learn to recognize limits, improvements in your capacity that happen very slowly, and the overviews help you in conversations with your healthcare providers. All data is stored only on your phone and you decide which data you share in an overview with your healthcare provider.

The following features are in Crono Care Coach.

Score your day

How tired are you really? "I'm tired" can mean anything - a bit weary after a busy day, or completely exhausted and barely able to function.

Score your day helps you make this objective by assessing two things daily on a scale of 0 to 10: your fatigue and the intensity of your day.

With fatigue, you measure how exhausted you feel. A 0 means completely rested with energy for everything, a 5 is moderately tired where things take effort, and a 10 is completely exhausted. The intensity measures how heavy or busy your day was - how many activities, stress, and stimuli you've had.

By tracking this daily, you see patterns emerge. Maybe Mondays are always heavier, or you notice that bad weather increases your fatigue. These concrete numbers also help tremendously in conversations with healthcare providers. Instead of "I'm always tired" you can say "my fatigue averaged a 7 this month, with peaks to 9 on Wednesdays."

The scale is based on the Borg scale, a scientifically recognized method for measuring exertion and fatigue. You can read more about how this scale works in our knowledge base article about the Borg scale.

Activity log

The spoon theory is widely used for chronic conditions where energy is limited. The idea is that everything you do costs energy. And that everyone wakes up with a certain amount of energy. A limited number of spoons. Crono Care Coach has made this theory concrete by replacing the spoons with a points system based on that same Borg scale and the Pomodoro timer. A point is basically 30 minutes of activity or up to Borg scale 6. By tracking your daily activities and linking points to them, it becomes clear how many points you can handle in a day without your conditions causing problems. And of course, that number of points varies a bit, depending on whether you've slept well or poorly, or if you're having an attack of your condition.

But... by learning over time that you can handle, for example, 15 points, if you've already used 10 points by 2 PM, you can take more rest to prevent going over your limit. And that's exactly what pacing is about.

Additionally, and that's one of the reasons why Crono Care Coach has this feature, recovery with Long COVID (but also with Asthma) is slow. And we often forget what we did 2 weeks ago. Imagine now that you've tracked activities daily for three months, and with 10 points things went well, few setbacks. And 3 months later you're at 12 points with the same feeling. Then you've shown 20% improvement.

Activity log thus helps with building up.

The app is built with Long COVID and (severe) Asthma in mind, energy is always limited. That's why there are also standard activities (you can set them yourself) with which you can quickly register activities on a day. And the "add automatically" option for a standard activity ensures that activity is automatically added every day.

Color your day

Color your day is inspired by the various types of action plans used in healthcare for chronic conditions. They all use the (proven) traffic light method, the color determines which phase you're in regarding your chronic condition:

Green: Your condition is in the stable phase, you can do things within your own limits and try to build up further
Orange: Your body (or environment) is giving warnings, your condition is worsening. Take the right steps to prevent worse
Red: Unfortunately you're in an attack or relapse of a condition. It hasn't succeeded (and unfortunately that happens) to prevent the worsening

Color your day uses this color coding. And like everything in the app, you can adjust the colors yourself and add extra colors. You can color your day with the colors of how you feel your condition for four parts of the day (night, morning, afternoon, and evening). By tracking, you can recognize patterns, for example that you're regularly in orange on Fridays, or mainly at night (characteristic for many people with asthma). You can then combine those patterns and volatility with the activities (am I secretly doing too much after all?).

The monthly calendar in insights is very handy to quickly get an overview. And via export you can make a year export of color your day and discuss this with your healthcare provider. And over the years you can even recognize patterns like more volatility in spring, or autumn? And then link the right actions to that.

Trigger registration

Many chronic conditions worsen due to external triggers. For Long COVID that can be sound, or crowds. For people with asthma an allergy or certain scents, or other external stimuli. And in general, stress, tension, and intense emotional events worsen a chronic condition.

That's why Crono Care Coach also has the so-called trigger registration. Here you can record what the triggers were for an attack on a day. Again, you can add a trigger yourself, but also for ease of use select your standard triggers (via Settings). By quickly tapping the trigger, you select the trigger for that attack.

This registration helps you to see later, via insights, which triggers worsen your condition(s) the most. So you can discuss this with your healthcare provider to see if there's something to prevent these triggers, or certain medication.

Personal actionplan

An action plan has been used in healthcare for years for chronic conditions. They help you get more control over your condition. An action plan is often divided into three phases:

green: green means your condition is stable
orange: you're in the alarm phase, there are signals that the condition might worsen, take action to prevent worse
red: unfortunately it hasn't succeeded, your condition has worsened (asthma attack, PEM crash, etc.)

In each phase of the plan you describe, together with your healthcare provider(s), which actions you take in which phase, which (extra) medications you take and for example which pitfalls you see and how to deal with them. It also often states when you contact your healthcare provider.

A personal action plan thus provides answers to all these questions in advance so you know better what you (and your environment) should do.

The personal action plan in Crono Care Coach is an implementation of this action plan, in which you answer different questions per color (you can take over the colors from color your day, or take your own colors), together with your healthcare provider. The advantage is that you always have your action plan with you and can show it anywhere in case of emergency.