Recovery after Surgery

Knomee may help during recovery after surgery

Since we have released Knomee version 2.0 in May, we are upgrading our iOS app every month with performance improvements, bug fixes and small usability enhancements. Thanks to our user feedbacks, we are getting closer to the worry-free experience that you all deserve. Here are a few of the fixes that were introduced in version 2.02 and 2.03:

• Show the quest category on home page (looks nicer) and make the big square "quest switch" button more visible on that home page. If you are not familiar to Knomee: the square button with your quest name helps you to see all your quests and select a new one. Managing multiple quests is much more interesting.

• Make mountains more explicit ( you may click on them). Mountains icons are a simple summary of (a) how you are doing globally with respect to the target (shape of the mountain) and what is the trend (weather element : sun means that you improve, clouds that you decline).

• Introduce HRV from Apple Watch: Heart Rate Variability is a key bio-value that you may track, it tells you a lot about your heart health. We have introduced a standard quest to improve you HRV through sleep, reducing inflammatory foods and exercising your body.

• Better memo edit and display in the chart view (the one that you get clicking on the eye). Memos are a key new feature of version 2.0. You may annotate Knomee with key moments, which will make it easier later to reflect on your self-tracking.

• Bug fixes for quests with only 2 or 3 trackers (most of the quests use one target and three trackers, so we had missed a few things).

One of our team member received open heart surgery a few months ago and has gone through recovery using Knomee. Most of his usual quests were useless because of the global state of weakness after a major surgery. On the other hand, creating a handful of new quests dedicated to the recovery turned out to be very helpful. Here is a short summary of the key benefits:

• Self-tracking helps to get a sense of your progress even though recovery is a complex story with ups and downs. The chaotic nature of recovery (how the pain reduces, for instance) is such that self-tracking helps to see the bigger picture.

• After heart surgery, it makes sense to leverage other apps or sensors on your phone or connected device : "Instant Heart Rate" is a great companion app for Knomee:the shape of heart rate tells a lot, from arrhythmia to extra-systolic pulses. Rest heart rate and HRV are two other bio-measures that are very interesting to monitor to see your (slow) progress through recovery.

• Knomee helps you to discover what factors will speed up your recovery : sleep (major ... no surprises, but it feels good to see it from your data analysis), food excitant (coffee, alcohol), fat intake, etc. Everyone reacts differently, but Knomee helps you find the lifestyle and diet that will speed up your recovery to wellness.

• Use of memos for key first moments during recovery - this is one of the most exciting application of Knomee 2.0 memo feature. During recovery there are good times (small victories : the first time you get back to being able to do something) and bad ones. Recording them using memos puts your self-tracking into perspective and makes your journey to better health an emotional one.

This short real-life user story is interesting because it emphasises one key principle of Knomee : there are no universal quests, the one that matter the most should be crafted by the user ... and there are no permanent quests. A quest fits a moment of your life, when you ask yourself a few questions (recovery after a major surgery is definitely such a moment). You create a quest and you self-track to help you build your own opinion ... then you move to other things.

It also shows that self-tracking is only meaningful when you ask yourself a question. Otherwise it gets boring very soon, which is what we hear from some of our users.