I own a Fitbit and an Apple Watch, and other electric heart monitoring gadgets.  My life revolves around those gadgets.  It is becoming an obsession to check my heart health.  To a point where I will sit calmly in my La-Z-Boy and just look at my BPM.  Perhaps even try to do some breathing exercises to lower my heart rate.

Let me share some of the apps that I use daily to track my progress and heart.

I promise I will not bore you with details about each little app, other than sharing some feedback on how well they’ve helped me.

Cardiogram and HeartWatch are both Apple Watch apps that primarily track your heart rate (BPM).  But they do have different nuances and I don’t use the apps on a regular (daily) basis.

• Cardiogram measures your heart rate every five minutes, but it also helps you understand your overall health, sleep, stress, and fitness levels.
• HeartWatch only measures your heart rate across four topics: Waking, Regular, Workout, and Sleeping.

Qardio Arm has already been covered in my medical gadgets review.  It is a great app that tracks your blood pressure history and will show you if specific readings are normal or outside the normal specter.

I rarely purchase apps, perhaps just greedy, but I did decide to buy Pillow app. It analyzes your sleep cycles using your Apple Watch, or by placing your iPhone on the mattress near your pillow.  They bought version can also record your breathing although I have yet to see that happen.

The reason I bought Pillow was to better understand how well I slept and how many hours of sleep I get during the night.  Remember, good long sleep helps your heart relax and recover faster.  As such, make sure you get more than 7 hours of sleep and you should avoid using your electronic devices before going to sleep.

Medisafe has been a true lifesaver. It is actually rather simple and even better, it’s free. Consider it your electronic pill cabinet.  You add your medication into the app when you have to take it, the number of pills you need to take – and then it reminds you when to take on your iPhone or Apple Watch.  Cool, eh?

What is even better is that you can also add your medical appointments to Medisafe.  However, it does not link with your calendar, so you suddenly track in two locations which can be confusing.  I used it in the beginning bud gradually moved back to my phone calendar as it is linked to my iMac as well.

Another cool feature in Medisafe is the cabinet.  As I stated, you enter in your mediation details.  This becomes handy when you need to talk to medical staff and you have the list of medication handy.  However, if you add the number of pills in your prescriptions, then it will also remind you when you need to refill it, based on your dosage.

You can also invite others to access your Medisafe app so they are reminded about when to take medication and when to refill.  I’m impressed with Medisafe and can highly recommend it.

Fitbit is awesome.  I will probably write a review just on that device, app, and website.  In short, based on the data collected from the Fitbit device itself, it updates the app in simple dashboards and you can add data such as water consumption, weight, and exercises.

Fitbit also tracks your sleep, steps taken and heart BPM.  It graphs everything and you can see the history easily.  This is tremendously helpful as you can track and see your progress, and that in turn gives you confidence.

Health is also a good app.  However, you need to add more apps your devices to track different things that come out of the box on Fitbit.  When using the dashboards in the Health app, it will show you which apps can be used to track different measurements such as sleep, weight, and BPM.  Activity app ties into the Health app to provide data about your exercises, i.e. your activities.

Overall, all these apps are great to track and monitor your progress.  Once you have achieved your goals you can, of course, continue to use them to track your physical health and help improve your continued efforts to become even healthier.

What apps do you use?

NB – not sure how many of these apps are available on the Android platform.