Bearable

Customisable symptom and mood tracker

The app CodeLeap launched now supports a community of more than 900,000 people.

What we did CodeLeap designed and built Bearable's iOS and Android app in under three months, with a data model organised from the start around categories that users define for themselves, providing the flexibility the app needed to fit health journeys that fixed-list trackers cannot describe.

Bearable helps people understand their own health by tracking the factors that shape it — sleep, diet, exercise, symptoms, mood and medication — and then showing how those factors relate to one another over time. CodeLeap designed and built the iOS and Android app in under three months, with a data model organised from the start around categories that users create for themselves. The product has travelled a long way since launch. It now has more than 900,000 community members, over half a million downloads on Google Play, and thousands of five-star reviews across both app stores.

Product features

Customisable symptom and mood tracking

Users log mood and symptoms alongside variables such as sleep, medication and step count pulled from device health data. Because the categories are defined by the user rather than chosen from a fixed taxonomy, the app fits health journeys that standard trackers describe poorly, and this is the characteristic that most distinguishes Bearable from everything else in the category.
Interactive graphs and statistical insights

Health data is presented through readable charts that surface trends and correlations between variables over time, which turns a log of daily entries into something a person can reason from and take into an appointment with their doctor. Presenting statistical relationships clearly to a non-technical audience was one of the more demanding parts of the design work.
Smart medication reminders

A reminder system lets users schedule alerts for specific times, days and custom frequencies. For people managing ongoing treatment regimes, consistency is the outcome the app exists to support, so the reminders had to be flexible enough to match real prescriptions.
Privacy by design

Health data is among the most sensitive information a person can record about themselves. The app was built with end-to-end encryption and careful handling of personal data from the first release, rather than adding it once the product had users.

Challenge

Most health and mood trackers work from a fixed set of things to measure, which serves some users well and leaves others with no way to record what actually matters to them. Bearable was conceived around the opposite principle. Users define their own symptom and behavioural categories, and the app then reports on how those self-defined factors affect their wellbeing. That flexibility is the product's central proposition and also its main engineering difficulty, because the data model, the reporting layer and the interface all have to accommodate categories that did not exist when the app was written. The founders needed to reach market quickly with something genuinely scalable, and needed a development partner who could work at that pace while handling sensitive personal health data responsibly.

Solution

CodeLeap designed, built and launched Bearable's mobile app in under three months, delivering the customisable tracker, the graphing and insight layer and the medication reminder system as a coherent first release. User-defined tracking is native to the architecture rather than layered on top of it, and that foundation is what allowed the product to keep growing in the years that followed.

What Bearable has achieved since launch speaks for the app it was built on. It holds a 4.8 rating from more than 6,400 ratings on the US App Store and has passed half a million downloads on Google Play. Clinicians at Cedars-Sinai reviewed it as one of the best mobile health applications for tracking subjective patient outcomes, the US Pain Foundation recommends it, and it has been covered or recommended by Forbes, Time, Vox, WebMD, Self and Verywell. More than 75% of users say that the main outcome of using it is feeling more in control of their health.