skip to main content

articles

14 Best Mobile Apps for Managing Chronic Pain

Posted on January 02 2023

Key Points

  • Chronic pain is a type of pain that lasts for an extended period, usually more than 12 weeks. It may result from acute trauma or nerve damage, persisting for months or even years.
  • In general, chronic pain can have various underlying causes, it is often challenging to treat, and it severely impacts sufferers’ overall quality of life.
  • Maintaining a pain journal and monitoring how your pain influences your everyday tasks can be a helpful approach for chronic pain patients to comprehend what exacerbates their pain and what alleviates it. Besides that, it can enable you to explain to your healthcare providers how your pain has impacted you over a certain period of time.
  • All in all, there are many mobile phone apps, such as Mesmerize, that are available to assist patients with managing chronic pain symptoms more effectively.

Living with chronic pain can be extremely tough as it can affect your daily life and performance at work. In certain cases, some people tend to give up and accept chronic pain as a permanent part of their identity, which can be a negative mindset to have.

Chronic pain patients are typically advised to monitor their pain levels to anticipate flare-ups or to identify potential triggers. However, aside from maintaining a manual record of all activities and meals consumed, there is a shortage of effective ways to track chronic pain episodes. Moreover, it can be difficult to establish a correlation between food, activities, and chronic pain. Nonetheless, the good news is that new pain-tracking apps and pain diaries are changing the game.

Top Mobile Apps to Help Manage Chronic Pain

Generally speaking, there is a multitude of apps that cater to people with chronic pain, providing various forms of support. From tracking symptoms to practicing mindfulness and/or other methods, there is a diverse range of options to choose from. While some of these apps are free, others may require a subscription or another form of payment for the paid versions.

Mesmerize

Mesmerize is a meditation app that provides users with a one-of-a-kind experience through a combination of stunning visuals, calming music, and expert narrations. This audio-visual experience helps to alleviate pain by guiding users through meditations that are professionally crafted to be effective.

The mesmerizing visuals, psychoacoustic soundtracks, and visual breathing features are all based on clinically-approved principles that help relax the body and alleviate chronic pain and related psychological symptoms like stress, anxiety, and depression.

If this piques your interest, do consider using Mesmerize today by downloading it on your iOS or Android device.

Wave

Wave is a health app available to download on Google Play or the App Store. Fundamentally, it is designed to help chronic illness patients track their symptoms, sleep, steps, medications, and other activities. In essence, Wave's aim is to empower users with personal insights that help them collaborate with doctors to manage the side effects and symptoms of their chronic illnesses. Plus, the app serves as a virtual health advocate and companion, guiding users to take steps to recover smoothly.

By providing insightful charts on various aspects such as moods, medications, and sleep, the app enables users to identify what might be affecting their ups and downs. These reports can then be shared with doctors to avoid unpleasant side effects and improve the quality of care. Users can also integrate the app with health devices such as Google Fit to maintain a comprehensive record of their physical and emotional well-being. Additionally, the app leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to generate real-time personal insights based on the user's experiences, which helps to identify how their actions correlate to their symptoms.

Pathways Pain Relief

Pathways Pain Relief is a comprehensive program created to help diagnose and treat chronic pain. In particular, Pathways Pain Relief's diagnosis is designed to pinpoint the source and type of pain, specializing in areas such as back pain, migraines, joint pain, and digestive issues. Furthermore, the program uses a variety of techniques to help you manage and control your pain, including pain science education, physical exercise, meditation, breathing visualizations, graded imagery, and stress-reducing exercises.

All in all, its aim is to serve as a personal pain therapist who guides you on your journey to understand the cause of your pain and subsequently break the pain cycle. You can track your progress over time, monitor how your pain develops, and focus on the pain relief techniques that work for you. Essentially, the app gives you the freedom to determine which methods would be the most suitable one for you.

Releaf

Releaf was created by founder Brockelman Franco after he struggled to find relief for his mother, who was frustrated by the lack of information and intimidated by the stigma surrounding medical marijuana. To briefly summarize, Releaf helps users track their progress with specific treatment methods and share their results, giving them the confidence to choose what works best for them. 

Curable

In terms of its backstory, the Curable app was developed by a science advisory team with members from various disciplines and has received recognition from different industries. Essentially, Curable is a mental health app that provides a virtual coach to help individuals manage and cope with their pain through various mental activities.

To do so, the app offers bite-sized audio lessons and over 100 science-backed exercises for pain relief, focusing on the user's unique needs and prioritizing their health. Curable's approach is different from traditional medication or physical treatment, as it delves into the brain science of pain to alleviate it.

Bearable

The creator of Bearable, who has chronic health conditions, was inspired to develop the app after struggling to find a tracker that provided comprehensive mood and symptom entries alongside other health factors.

With that said, Bearable is a health-tracking app that aims to centralize all of your medical data in one place. In addition to recording general physical and mental health data, Bearable allows you to customize additional factors, such as sleep and diet, to keep track of. Moreover, the app's encrypted data can be searched and analyzed to identify trends and patterns, as well as presented in graphs and interactive calendars. Consequently, you can easily export your data for personal use or to share with your medical team. 

Bearable is available on both iOS and Android and offers a free version as well as premium subscriptions priced at $4.49 per month or $27.99 per year.

CareClinic

CareClinic is a comprehensive health and wellness app designed to help you monitor and improve your health. With CareClinic, you can set up a treatment and pill organizer to manage not only your medications but also your supplements, nutrition, activity, therapies, and daily vitals. The app automatically detects correlations and triggers, and you can easily enter prescriptions and report information by taking a photo.

The app includes a database of drugs and supplements for reference and information. The database also provides nutritional information so that you can get calorie, macronutrient, and micronutrient information for your food and drinks. Other features of the app include medication reminders, a daily check-in diary to track your progress, and the ability to record various measurements, such as sleep, mood, energy levels, and pain. The diary can also function as a symptom diary, where you can log symptom severity.

Other than that, you can collaborate with your doctor or caregiver by allowing them to view your care plan and reports. You can use the summarized reports from your check-ins to see what is working and what is not, thereby working towards your goals in a much more effective manner. 

mySymptoms

For patients with gastrointestinal issues such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), celiac disease, dyspepsia, or food intolerances, tracking their food intake is critical.

Having mentioned that, the mySymptoms app allows users to log food, drinks, medication, environmental factors, stress, exercise, bowel movements, energy levels, sleep quality, and other specific symptoms, including intensity, duration, and additional notes. The app also allows users to export data in various formats.

The mySymptoms app is available on iOS and Android, with the full version costing $3.99. 

Health Storylines

Health Storylines is a chronic health app that offers personalized tools to track health data and break down care plans and interventions. It basically sets itself apart by partnering with patient organizations and designing organization-specific versions of the app for certain medical conditions. Health Storylines can sync with over 300 mobile devices to integrate health data and is available as an iOS app, Android app, and web app.

Pain Diary – CatchMyPain

Pain Diary is a pain management app that features a pain localization tool that enables users to draw on an on-screen figure to pinpoint which body parts hurt. On top of that, this tool uses color to indicate the intensity of the pain. Users can then add more details about the pain, such as duration, intensity, and a verbal description, using customizable options that range from "boring" to "agonizing."

Other than that, users can rank their stress levels, fatigue, and additional symptoms during the pain event. Additionally, Pain Diary also includes a tracking feature based on location or the manual data entry of weather conditions. With that, this app is available on the Google Play store.

WebMD Pain Coach

WebMD Pain Coach is a popular app on iOS for managing pain with a user-friendly layout and simple features. In specific, the app includes a slider tool that allows users to rate their overall experience of each day, using descriptive terms like "great," "really good," "good," "manageable," "bad," "really bad," and "unbearable."

Users can then track their pain and symptoms throughout the day, including triggers, treatments, and notes. To personalize the experience, users are asked to create a free login and complete a setup process that customizes checkbox options for each reporting screen. In addition to pain tracking, WebMD Pain Coach encourages users to set goals for sleep, exercise, and other types of healthy behaviors. To supplement that, the app also provides a vast library of information and tips for managing chronic pain conditions and suggests goals tailored to the user's individual needs.

My Pain Diary

A chronic pain patient developed this beneficial pain management app to address the challenges endured by patients suffering from chronic pain. In short, the app is customizable and features weather forecasting, a medication tracker, a pain diary, and a symptom tracker that records both physical and psychological symptoms. Not to mention, this pain management app enables patients to create PDF reports and graphs to share with their physicians during appointments. 

If you believe that such a solution may be a worthwhile investment for you, the app can be downloaded on the App Store.

Branch Health

Branch Health, previously known as Ouchie, was created to aid individuals in monitoring their chronic pain treatment. Fundamentally speaking, the app links the user with their medical team, allowing them to observe progress and determine which treatments are effective and which are not. Moreover, it incorporates tools that employ cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which has been showcased to be one of the most effective approaches for managing chronic pain. 

PainScale

All in all, the PainScale app is designed to assist individuals with chronic pain in monitoring their pain levels, triggers, and treatments. It is available on Google Play or the App Store. In addition, PainScale offers informative articles on different chronic pain conditions, like fibromyalgia, to help users better comprehend their health condition.

More specifically, PainScale measures pain both overall and in specific areas of the body. Its detailed body map enables individuals to indicate the level and type of pain experienced in particular parts of the body. Furthermore, the app maintains comprehensive records of treatments, including medications, so that their efficacy can be assessed over time. The PainScale app also allows users to generate personalized pain reports and insights to aid in pain management. This feature allows them to document the progress of current treatments, establish a baseline pain level before commencing a novel treatment, and evaluate how their condition may or may not be improving in different areas.

By tracking pain-related data in the PainScale app, users can recognize potential pain triggers, such as weather changes or specific activities, and observe how pain adversely impacts multiple aspects of daily life, ranging from sleep quality to mood. 

The Bottom Line

To sum up, exploring health monitoring apps can assist you in tracking your chronic pain. These apps, especially Mesmerize, offer a secure platform for storing your information and records, along with an additional feature that links you to a physician's assistant if you have any concerns. The apps are also user-friendly and can be utilized by both the patient and the caregiver. However, it is critical to keep in mind that healthcare apps are not intended to replace in-person appointments with your doctor. In essence, the aim of these apps is to facilitate more informed discussions with your doctor.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is it really necessary to track my chronic pain?

If you are suffering from chronic pain, you might also be confused about what is happening to you. Therefore, in order to understand your medical problems, you need to document them first. With that in mind, chronic management apps may be able to assist you in doing just that.

How do people typically manage chronic pain?

In short, chronic pain can be alleviated through various medical treatments, such as over-the-counter (OTC) or prescription medication, physical therapy, as well as less commonly used treatments like surgery. Nevertheless, these treatment options represent only a few pieces of the problem when it comes to resolving chronic pain.

How could chronic pain influence our behavior?

People who suffer from chronic pain may experience depression or anxiety and have an increased risk of developing substance abuse and other mental health disorders. Besides that, other typical emotional reactions to chronic pain include feelings of sadness, anger, frustration, being misunderstood, and feeling extremely demoralized.