Visible: Pacing for illness

I have finally found a way to track how much activity I do and how to pace myself in a way that feels easy. I have met with other ME and Long Covid patients in support groups who are also benefiting from Visible with the arm band. There’s a learning curve and I am still working through accessing all of the functions, but I was up and running pretty quickly. Very helpful.

I became a member as someone with great need and skepticism. Like their advertising, I’d been frustrated by my fitness tracker’s insistence on faster, higher, and more while lacking any way to be credited for walking a short distance slowly on lead legs with a walker. Yet I couldn’t quite see how this app would help me. It has helped! I now know how to see a crash coming; how to pace each day so that I’m strengthening but not overwhelming my system. I have a greater sense of control. I’m not endlessly failing as I did with my fitness tracker. Now, I can use the information from both. Thank you.

I’ve been diagnosed with ME/CFS and getting the Visible Plus subscription has made a huge difference in my understanding of my energy limits and my ability to pace. It’s not perfect and there are things I’d like to see to make it a little more customizable and personal, but it is a long sight better than anything else available!

Early in recovery, after crashing 2x and losing a month of gains, the app helped me keep activity within what my body could tolerate. My stamina is very very slowly getting stronger. There is still much I can’t do, so the app helps me see the improvement.

I’ve been using Visible since November 2023. As soon as I discovered it in a Facebook support group I signed up. By then I was almost completely incapacitated having suffered a major flare of chronic fatigue most likely due to COVID or the vaccine. Of course, the doctors specialists and tests of every imaginable type failed to offer any answers or relief. The ‘hidden nature’ of this illness. She’s one feel completely alone, isolated, and sometimes questioning one’s own sanity. I was desperate and lingering in a dark place of hopelessness. I’m not new to fatigue… I’ve had reoccurring Epstein Barr since I was young. Mostly it just looked like flu. I would get very ill a couple times a year and then recover but every time a little less and less. I didn’t understand what was happening or the significance of it. Over the course of my life, recovery became less and less complete. Then COVID came along and within less than two years I was fully disabled and no form of recovery and no amount of rest had made me any better at all. Since using this app and the biofeedback device I have been able to see what my heart rate is doing and attempt to find correlations and make changes and adjustments accordingly. For me it has been very difficult to find direct lines between factors and symptoms and that has been frustrating but I know other people have great success with this. For me- the best information I get is how my body is functioning through the day and over a period of time. When it’s not responding positively or recovering from exertion I can see it and that gives me the clues I need to choose to dial back my expectations to rest when I need to and delegate things when I can and try not to stress too much about it because it does pass. Stress, for me, has proven to be the biggest trigger. Emotional stress in particular. I do my best to moderate that and use tools to help me through rough times so they don’t completely knock the life out of me. It’s a learning journey. I recommend this app and the monitor to anyone living with chronic fatigue of any source. It will shed real time evidence of what your body is doing in response to exertion and rest and what factors play in to those things. Knowledge is power. Most recently as I’ve been seeing some signify improvement it’s gratifying to see that in the data and be amazing and grateful. The positive biofeedback is so powerful and encouraging when it comes on any consistent basis. Anyway - as you can te

Thank you for this program. It has made an enormous difference in my quality of life over the last year. The basic app was helpful, and the pulse tracking and pace points have made a huge difference in my ability to keep within my energy budget without crashing as much.

I have had ME/CFS for more than 17 years. Before visible, I was attempting to do heart rate base pacing with a polar watch and various apps. Because I also have POTS I found it impossible to go throughout my day without exceeding my anaerobic threshold and I found it difficult to make changes because of a lack of data. I also hated how even when the app would say “you over did it today” every single day, it would still tell me to exercise the next day 🙄 With the thorough breakdown of data available via Visible I have been able to make changes to my daily routine and, recently, begun to improve my overall baseline. I made the app work for me, I made slight adjustments to my heart rate zones and gave myself a bigger point budget, something that was actually achievable. Then I started figuring out what actions were taking the most points and figuring out how to reduce those. There will always be life circumstances that are beyond my control that require a large output of energy, these event events will result in crashes and often a reduce in baseline function . But with the data available via Visible, I feel like I have a real chance at improving that baseline. I also love how easy it is to add your data to existing and ongoing studies. I may never directly benefit from these studies, but for sure future generations will and that is very exciting and hopeful for me. Thank you so much to the patients who created Visible and who invest so much of their own energy into updates and improvements. I’m so very grateful 💜

I’ve had long Covid for over two years. The symptom keep morphing. I recently resigned from my part time job. This app will help me focus on pacing. I feels good to be a part of a community like this.

I now realize that my self-directed "pacing" lacked an evidence base that could really tell me what I was doing. I've only use this for a few days, but it has made a difference, at least in my awareness I would heartily recommend To anyone with a chronic viral illness.

I knew I was struggling with long covid and CFS/ME symptoms but I couldn’t figure out what to do. The visible app gave me the data I needed to get a POTS diagnosis. Now I use visible to monitor my energy levels, to make sure I’m sitting and resting as much as possible, and pacing. I’ve also started a workout for POTS and I use visible to make sure I stay in healthy heart rate ranges. It’s been really amazing. Being able to tag my activities and see how much energy is expended helped me to make better choices during the day - like taking baths instead of showers or sitting on a stool when I make coffee. I love it. I wish the arm band was different, it’s not easy to hide, but it’s really accurate, so I just suffer to fashion issue. I’d recommend this to anyone who struggles with cfs/me or other invisible illnesses.