Manage Long COVID with Guava

The eruption of Long COVID since the pandemic has unfortunately impacted millions of people worldwide. Since it’s still so new to the medical world, its effects are only starting to be understood, and there is much work to be done. When it comes to individuals, it’s incredibly difficult to predict who gets affected, why, and how it manifests itself. Because of all these factors, it can be hard to connect symptoms to triggers, especially when they seem random or unrelated.

Guava is meant for those struggling with chronic illnesses, like Long COVID, to help keep track of and sort through all your health info in one place. This information can be easily shared with providers to help them understand your health just as well as you do. More data means more answers.

Symptom Tracking

To get the most out of symptom tracking, you can log daily – even setting reminders to check in on symptoms of concerns – or log symptoms as they come up. You can record all the details you want, like severity, frequency, duration, and adjectives to help describe symptoms like brain fog, fatigue, chills, or irregular heartbeat. All this data is sorted through in Insights, where you can see what factors might affect your symptoms.

To record the location of your symptoms, you can use the body map feature to visually pinpoint certain flare-up areas. Over time, a ‘heat map’ will be generated which shows you which areas tend to flare up the most. You’ll find that location often correlates with other factors, like time of day, med schedules, or various triggers. You can also upload photos of your symptoms in Guava so that it’s easy to find and share them with your doctor during your visit.

Guava also lets you make custom symptoms and symptom groups unique to your MCAS. For example, symptom groups might include:

Food tracking

Since food can play a massive role in your overall health, keeping track of your diet can be crucial for identifying triggers and managing Long COVID. For example, if certain inflammatory foods evoke a stronger immune response, logging foods can be useful for learning what to avoid.

There are a couple of ways you can log food in Guava, but the simplest is to take a photo of your meal. Guava integrates with AI to characterize your meals or snacks using tags that you can also customize. For instance, your food can be labeled by dairy type (e.g. milk, cheese, or yogurt), sugar content, protein content, etc. The other way to log food is by creating manual entries. Guava will remember what you’ve logged so you can re-select meals you eat often.

You have the option to include nutrition info (calories, fat, and sodium) if that’s relevant for you, but it’s hidden by default. All this information can be analyzed in Insights to pinpoint which foods might be correlated with inflammation, pain, GI issues, or flare-ups in general.

Med Management

If you take medications to manage Long COVID, you can create custom med schedules, complete with reminders so that you don’t forget a dose. Besides remembering to take your meds, logging frequency, dosage, and type in Guava can help you and your provider figure out what’s working and what isn’t. You can also log over-the-counter meds or supplements to see if they’re helping or hurting your symptoms.

Personalized entries

The effects of Long COVID seem to be different for everyone, and unfortunately, that means symptoms come in many shapes and forms. Because of that, Guava allows personalized entries for events Guava doesn’t automatically capture.

For instance, if you suspect a certain environment, like a friend’s house or high altitude, makes your Long COVID symptoms worse, you can make a personalized entry for that event. If you opt for Premium, Guava can automatically test for correlations between your entries and your symptoms.

To add custom entries, press the “add entry” button on your Today page, select “more types,” scroll down, then press “add your own type.” From there, you can type in a name for your entry, choose if you want to enable tags and choose if it should be measured numerically or not.

Insights

All the data you log, as well as data synced from other health devices (i.e. your Oura Ring, Apple Watch, or Garmin), is analyzed in Insights. This allows you to monitor your health on a global scale. It can analyze everything from your personalized entries, symptoms, and diet to heart rate, blood pressure, and sleep. If you have Guava Premium, you’ll be equipped with auto-correlations so that you’re notified whenever statistically significant correlations occur, but you can also manually test correlations without Premium.

Visit Prep

When you’re headed to the doctor, Guava consolidates all this data into Visit Preps, which are sharable reports for your providers. Visit Prep reports are comprehensive overviews of your Long COVID-related history, both recent and long-term. They cover past medical history, what you’ve tracked in Guava, and any key patterns or triggers that have been identified.

Let’s say a medication change doesn’t seem to be helping with symptom flare-ups. Visit Prep is meant to be your advocacy sidekick by showing your doctor concrete data that can help you articulate your experience. The Visit Prep feature also helps you come up with questions relevant to your Long COVID or related conditions to ensure you’re getting the most out of your appointment.

The bottom line

Long COVID is a draining and complicated disease, so patients need the proper tools for management. These are just a few ways that Guava can be useful for identifying triggers, communicating with doctors, and managing symptoms. There is still work to be done, however, to improve the effectiveness of Guava. We rely on user feedback, so if there’s another way you’d like to see Guava help manage Long COVID specifically, let us know.