This would help A LOT. By far the most important.

Then there could be a chart if we rate it on a numerical scale. Visuals are extremely helpful

I would really like this feature. I noticed that most of my factors just boil down to “none of X”, “some of X”, “a lot of X”. It would be nice if it was just streamlined into a simple numerical value.

I have appreciated this feature on “My Symptoms” app, though Bearable is so much more of a pleasure to use, it’s the one I’m actually tracking in.

I’m also tracking many, none, much, for the same factor and it’s not working well with insights. It should be optional on a per factor basis because some factors are there/not there.

Agreed with this. Example of where the current settings give unhelpful information: My insights currently say that a “hot” weather day increases my mood. But that’s only because all the other days where my mood was worse, I had clicked on “very hot”. If it was simply a temperature scale, then it would tell me that heat decreases my mood, but the way it is now it could be interpreted as the opposite.

I agree with Jens. For factors where we measure quantity or intensity with separate choices (like no, some, a lot of social media, for example), it’s hard to get good analysis from it. This is related to a bigger challenge of mutually exclusive factors - I’m still exploring the roadmap, so maybe it’s on there already.

I have been searching for an hour for this feature / be able to customize it to be that way. Hopefully, this is still on the to-do list for future updates!

A follow up to this - customize how you input date (for features or otherwise) in terms of time-of-day, scale type, etc. I’d love to be able to customize it so that I can record some in the same way Symptoms are recorded, and some in the same way Mood/Energy levels are recorded. Or at least have the option for all of them to be changed.

This would also be useful for supplements or medication dosages which I currently have as factors but need to create a completely new factor for a different dosage

Yes, I was thinking of a similar thing so that I could record the amount of time I do an activity for, as I have ME and need to very gradually increase times eg that I spend doing hobbies, or walking etc. Less about intensity of factors, more about amount done.

Yes please! This would make it much easier to track the relationships between factors and symptoms

Hello!

Just checking in to let everyone know we haven’t forgotten about this suggestion. We are growing our small dev team and will make this a priority when we can.

Thank you all so much for bearing with us, and keep the suggestions coming!

The Bearable Team

Yes, yes, yes! I just downloaded the app last week and started using it, and this is the only major frustration I had. Being able to track factors be freqency/intensity (optionally–some factors do only need a yes/no toggle) would dramaticlaly improve the analysis.

May I ask what would be the main benefit of this for you over simply creating factors for each frequency/intensity level?

Hi James! Having 3-4 separate factors to represent one factor makes it very difficult to make associations. For example if I think that level of physical activity has an impact on my mood, I need to be able to convert this to ordinal values to see if increase in activity is associated with increase in mood. Currently I have it split into four different factors (none, low, medium, high) and I have to just toggle between these and eyeball it. Thank you for all your work!

Is this seriously a genuine question? You’re asking what the advantage is of not having to create, scroll through, and select between 3-4 times as many things??? And, as Jenna mentioned, have to search each different level of the same factor independently in insights and try to interpret that? I think you should maybe mark “brain fog” as a symptom today…

Anna, I think we all appreciate the work that the Bearable team does, and James is simply trying to clarify what is being asked of here and if there are alternatives. I think the tone of your response, as a user and “community member” is uncalled for. I understand first hand how frustrating chronic illness can be, but James is here to help us.

Thanks so much James for what you do. For me, as someone who has ME I have to slowly increase my activity levels over time, so if for example I’ve done some sewing, I currently can’t say how long I’ve done it for - is it 2 minutes or maybe 30 minutes? - it’d be really helpful to have a record of this as it makes a big difference to knowing how well I am pacing myself and then progressing in activity levels, or having a crash. I can look back and see that I did too much of that activity, or might be ready to increase it. At the moment I still note these things down separately by hand.

That would be so much better than separate options like “low smartphone use” “medium …” “large…”

Hoping to see this. Would be easier to visualize on a graph how more or less of X, affects mood, anxiety, stress and so on. Instead of shifting between 3-4 different factors. Please consider it 🙏 and have a great day

Agree, this would make the data make more sense. From one perspective, currently you could have ticked ‘Caffeine (None)’, ‘Caffeine (Low)’, and ‘Caffeine (Moderate)’ for the same day which doesn’t make sense yet it’s technically possible. So having factors behave similar to symptoms makes more sense. Plus this will also reduce the number of ‘columns’ in the database (instead of Boolean data type for ‘Caffeine (None)’, ‘Caffeine (Low)’, etc, it would be one column of data type string with the values ‘None’, ‘Low’, ‘Moderate’, and ‘High’). I can acknowledge this would mean significant changes in the backend and analytics, but I think a sustainable change and the later the change, the harder it gets.

Great to see it to planned. Definitely one of the necessary features to make this app the best. Congrats to the devs.

This will be fantastic. It would reduce clutter and prevent doubling up on things as Wesley mentions. As it is, I admit I find it confusing to decide which of the set of three options I want to track and I would really rather it was not a decision I had to make.

I imagine it could be done with the same tap-to-increase mechanism and the same color gradation (but maybe yellow to purple or something, since red is kind of a “bad” color). Perhaps this could connect to the function of the habit tracker feature in that a Factor could be set as either scaled or increasing: either on a “none-some-medium-lots-tons” with the colors or tap-to-increase with a number from zero (clear to null by tap-and-hold).

Another thing that’s kind of like this is pressing one button if it’s worse than it was yesterday, another if it’s about the same, and a third if it’s less bad. I often second guess my rating system, and my pain scale sometimes changes, so this would be helpful for me.

I’d love to see the Factor-scoring scale look more like the Symptom-scoring scale.

I’d prefer that as well. It would give a better overview having scales in the section ‘Other factors’. By now I have to choose every single possibility (low, medium, high, none) from a long list. In addition, it would make it possible to link e. g. activities to the time of day.