Disclaimer: I have been given free access to the Biojrnl health tracking app, and have received payment for writing this review. However, the opinions expressed here are entirely my own. I have not been asked to give a positive review, and I will always be honest about my experience of using the app — including anything I think could be improved.
A few weeks ago, I was asked if I would be willing to take a look at, and possibly write a review of, a newly developed health tracking app called Biojrnl.
I’ll be honest: as a chronic pain blogger, I get quite a few requests like this, and I don’t often agree to them. Sometimes the product isn’t something I would personally use, sometimes it isn’t a good fit for my blog, and sometimes I simply don’t have the time or energy to even think about it.
But I took a look at Biojrnl and was genuinely interested in what I saw. After spending some time using the app, I felt that it was something my readers might find useful, so I was happy to agree to write this review.
A Quick Introduction to Biojrnl Health Tracking App
I found Biojrnl to be a very easy-to-use health tracking app with a clean, straightforward interface.
The app can be used free of charge. However, there are also paid plans which obviously have a few more features. When I started using the app, I used the free plan to start with, as I believe many users will use it that way, at least initially.
When it comes to health tracking apps, in my opinion, one of the most important factors is privacy, and I particularly like Biojrnl’s approach to privacy. According to its privacy policy, your journal isn’t stored on Biojrnl’s servers as part of normal use; it’s stored on your phone.
You can, however, choose to store, back up and sync your journal with other devices by using the Biojrnl cloud server. By default, this setting is off. If you do decide to use it, your information is encrypted and stored on the Biojrnl server in the EU. When you enable this feature, the privacy information is clearly explained, and you need to click a consent box to confirm that you understand.
On two of the plans, there’s also an option to share a profile with a guest. That shared profile is stored on Biojrnl’s cloud server to allow the guest access. This is clearly explained in the privacy policy and again when you set up guest access.
A Brief Overview of Biojrnl’s Features
On all plans, including the free version, there’s a useful profile section where users can add as many or as few personal details as they wish. The daily journal allows users to record information about their health, medications, sleep, lifestyle and symptoms quickly and easily.
The paid plans add several further features, including a useful appointments section and the ability to generate a summary of journal entries, which can help when preparing for an appointment.
What it Does Not Do
Biojrnl doesn’t try to diagnose the user based on their entries, and it doesn’t give gold stars for exercising or sticking to a diet for a day. It doesn’t analyse their entries for them. Instead, it provides a place to record health information that may be important or that could help the user identify and track patterns themselves.
Find out more about Biojrnl on their website by clicking here.
How Can Health Tracking Apps Like Biojrnl Help?
I’ve lived with pain and other health issues for most of my life, so I already know some of my triggers. Cold wind makes my facial pain worse, and standing for too long hurts my back. But sometimes things change. Pain can become more frequent or severe, new symptoms can appear, and when you take several medications every day, it isn’t always easy to know whether something is a symptom or a side effect.
That’s where health tracking can be useful. I don’t want to spend hours writing a detailed health diary every day — I want to record what’s happening without becoming obsessed with my health. An app makes that much easier. I can spend a couple of minutes making an entry, close it, and get on with my day. Then, if my pain or symptoms change, I have something to look back at which might help me look for possible connections or reasons for the change.
How Biojrnl Helped Me
After using Biojrnl for several days, I developed a headache. I have a history of headaches and migraines, so it wasn’t completely unusual, but this one kept coming back for several days.
In the past, food has often been a trigger for my headaches, so I immediately looked through my entries to see what I had been eating. There was one new addition to my diet which had started at exactly the same time as the headaches.
Bingo! It must be that!
I stopped eating that particular food immediately. Problem solved — or so I thought.
The headache continued.
So I went back to my Biojrnl entries and looked again. I checked when the headaches had started and noticed something else: it was also around the same time I’d collected my new glasses.
Could my glasses be causing the headaches?
I took them off and realised that the arms were fitting far too tightly behind my ears. Considering that even light pressure can cause me considerable facial pain, perhaps my glasses were the problem.
I loosened the glasses and the next day, the headache was gone. (It feels like one of those things you couldn’t make up because it was such a ridiculous reason for having a perpetual headache!)
I probably would have worked it out eventually, but tracking everything gave me a much easier way to look back at what had changed and when. More importantly, it reminded me not to focus on the first explanation that came to mind.
Sometimes the trigger isn’t the most obvious one — and that’s one of the reasons I find health tracking useful.
Using Biojrnl in More Detail
I found Biojrnl easy to use, with a range of features that I found useful.
Your Health Passport
When you first open Biojrnl, you can add details to your profile such as medical conditions, blood type, allergies, doctor’s details and emergency contacts. From this information, you can create what Biojrnl calls a Health Passport and, if you wish, save it as a PDF.
I can see this being particularly useful when travelling, but it could also be a handy document to have available in case of an emergency.
Keeping Track of Medication
There’s also a medication section where you can add the medications you take, along with the times you take them. You can set reminders for each dose too.
For anyone dealing with complex health issues or, like me, the occasional bout of brain fog, I think having medication reminders can be particularly useful. When you’re taking several medications at different times of the day, it’s surprisingly easy to wonder, “Did I take that one?”
Recording Your Daily Health
When you create a journal entry, you can choose from a number of categories, such as Gut Health, Joints & Muscles, and Head & Dizziness. Within each category there are further sub-categories, making it easy to record what is happening in the relevant section.
If your particular symptom or health issue isn’t listed, you can add your own sub-category. For example, under Head & Dizziness, I was able to add Trigeminal Neuralgia.
You can also return to a journal entry to add updates as things change, rather than having to create a completely new entry each time.
Biojrnl Plans
There are four plans available, one of which is free. There are also Pro, Family and Care plans. The free plan does have limitations, but I found it adequate for what I needed. The full details of plans and pricing structure can be found here.
Biojrnl Paid Plan Features
The paid plans add several further features, including the ability to add extra categories, log blood test results and vaccinations, store health-related documents and details of appointments, and prepare for appointments.
Here, you can select sections from the app to be included in a PDF summary. So, without much effort, I was able to tick a few boxes and produce a summary which I could show a doctor if I wanted to. I feel it’s quite handy having everything about your health stored in one, easy-to-access place on your phone.
On two of the plans, Family and Care, you can add extra profiles to the account and then add a co-manager.
One feature on the Family and Care plans that I particularly liked was the ability to invite a temporary guest and give them limited access to the account. They can only see what you want them to see, so you could leave instructions about things such as when to give medication or any allergies they need to be aware of.
The guest does need to have the Biojrnl app, but they can use either the Free or Pro plan. They do not need to subscribe to one of the more expensive plans.
I Realised I Could Also Track Kip’s Health
The feature that allows me to track someone else’s health was an amazing discovery for me. Except I didn’t use it for a person — I used it for my dog!
If you follow my blog, you’ll probably know about Kip’s health issues. She has severe allergies which affect her skin, and she sees the vet more often than I see my doctor. I was forever writing notes to stick on the fridge with dates for when she started new medication, along with dosages and notes from the vet. Then I’d have to add more notes about possible side effects and how her skin was responding to treatment.
With Biojrnl, I can document all that information in one place. I can keep track of her medication, supplements, shampooing routine and anything else I need to remember. It’s simple to use and takes less than a minute.
While I was using Biojrnl, I gave Kip a supplement which we hoped might help her skin. Because I was already tracking what I was giving her and how she was doing, I quickly noticed that instead of helping, it appeared to be making her worse.
Without tracking, I would probably have reached the same conclusion, but it might have taken me longer to spot the connection.
And, let’s be honest, anything that means fewer scraps of paper stuck to my fridge is a winner in my book!
I was quite excited to tell the developer about this, and he told me that he’d already thought of people using the app to track a pet’s health. He explained that I hadn’t even needed to add Kip as an extra profile. On the Pro Plan, I could simply have used one of the custom categories — the one with the dog picture.
Doing that meant I didn’t need to change profiles when adding entries for Kip. Because she had a category of her own, I was also able to add subcategories for things such as medication, shampooing and skin condition.
So, although I initially used the extra profile option, there was actually an even easier way to keep track of Kip.
My Overall Thoughts About Biojrnl
The Interface
One of the things I particularly like about Biojrnl is its simplicity. It isn’t packed with bells and whistles just for the sake of having them. It does what I need it to do, and it does it without making me work hard to use it.
The Biojrnl Website
The Biojrnl website, like the app, is straightforward, giving details about the app, pricing structure and a useful FAQ page. The website also says that support emails will always come from a human. I see this as a bonus because nowadays, customer support can very often leave people going round in circles simply because they’re dealing with bots. I know I always heave a sigh of relief when I’m dealing with a real person if I need help with something.
A Daily Message From Biojrnl
This might sound insignificant to some people, but whenever you open the Biojrnl app, you see a new message every day. The messages aren’t about goal-setting or unmanageable achievements. They’re simple, encouraging messages about self-care.
It’s a small thing, but when you’re having a rough day, sometimes it’s nice to read, “It’s okay to rest.”
A Downside to the Free Version of Biojrnl
I really like Biojrnl, but I was disappointed that the free version only allows twenty entries in the journal. That doesn’t mean you can no longer use the app, but you do need to delete existing entries to free up space. If those entries were important, you wouldn’t want to lose them.
The creator of Biojrnl has thought of that, though, and before deleting your entries, you can export them so you can save them elsewhere. I tried this function, and it worked very well. I exported my entries as a PDF and sent it to my own email address. It was a neat and easy-to-follow document.
So the problem of losing your information was solved, but I do wish it allowed more than twenty entries, so users didn’t need to export and delete them. If you’re like me and have several health issues to keep track of, twenty entries can get used up fairly quickly.
There are also features in the paid versions which I do wish were available on the free version. At the same time, I understand that there’s a person at the other end of the app who has spent time creating it, maintaining it and covering the costs of publishing it on Apple and Google. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable that some features are kept for paying users.
For me, the important thing is that the free version is still useful, and it was enough for me to get a good feel for how Biojrnl works before deciding to explore the paid features.
Would I Recommend the Biojrnl Health Tracking App?
Yes, I would. I’ve genuinely enjoyed using Biojrnl, and I can see myself continuing to use it. I particularly like that it is simple to use without being overly complicated, while still offering plenty of useful features for people who want to keep track of their health.
The twenty-entry limit on the free version is my biggest niggle, but the ability to export your entries means you don’t have to lose information you’ve recorded. If you want access to the other features, there are paid plans available, but I think the free version is a good way to try Biojrnl and see whether it works for you.
For me, the biggest benefit is having all my health information in one place, without having to spend ages recording it. And, as I’ve discovered, that can be useful for more than just keeping track of my own health — even Kip gets a look-in!
If you’d be interested in trying the Biojrnl app, it’s available on Apple and Google Play.
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I hope you have found this review helpful. Do you try to track your health?
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