The situation
Jordan's daughter Mia is 11 and has juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Mia's too young to track her own symptoms, so Jordan does it, usually in a hurry: after a call from school, at pickup, while dinner's cooking. Jordan isn't fluent in rheumatology terms and doesn't need to be.
Set it up for her, not you
- Create the profile in your child's name. The first profile doesn't have to be you. Only the name is required. A photo helps if you'll add more profiles later. You don't need a profile for yourself.
- Add her condition. Search the catalogue, select it, then pick the symptoms she actually has from the list below it. If something isn't listed, add it in your own words.
- Add her medications, with their schedules.
From then on, every entry screen says "Logging for Mia", and the dashboard asks how Mia is doing today, not how you are.
Day to day
Log what you saw, when you saw it, in your own words. Tap + and type:
- "Limping at pickup, right knee"
- "Swollen wrists this morning, didn't want to hold a pencil"
- "Slept 9 hours, woke once"
Health Flare suggests an entry type from what you typed. Change it if it guessed wrong. The timestamp defaults to now, but you can move it back if you're logging the school's phone call two hours later.
For medications, log each dose as taken, skipped, or missed. A missed dose can have a reason ("left it at her dad's"), which is often what the specialist actually wants to know.
When she's in a flare, start one from the dashboard. Everything logged until you end it is grouped under that flare, with a start, an end, and a peak severity.
Before the appointment
- Write your questions into the appointment. Tick them off in the room.
- Look at the trend. Open Insights and check her symptom trends since the last visit. It's easier to say "worse in the mornings for three weeks" when you can see it.
- Export a report for the range since her last visit. The header has her name and the dates, so it can't be confused with anyone else's. Share it as a PDF.
Afterwards, write down what the doctor said, any dose changes, and when the follow-up is.
Her data stays with you
There's no account, no Health Flare server, and no analytics. Your child's record lives on your phone, and in your phone's own iCloud or Google backup if you use one. If you don't use phone backups, export a password-protected backup from Settings before you change phones.
What it doesn't do
Health Flare doesn't sync. If both parents want to log, the record lives on one phone. You can export a backup from one phone and import it on the other using "Add missing data", but that's a manual copy, not live sharing.