It’s not easy to keep on top of your health and how your day to day stresses are affecting your wellbeing. With Welltory, you can keep on top of key health and stress metrics, which is ideal for busy people. Despite offering a place to accumulate metrics holistically about your health and lifestyle, I feel Welltory assesses heart health as its’ core function. The heart rate variability monitor promises to keep you in tune with even the slightest variations in your health.
What is Welltory?
First off, let me just say that Welltory is packed with impressive features that can give you an in-depth understanding of your health. The app uses smart health tracking to analyse your data and provide insights and suggestions based on the information it gathers.
One of the standout features of Welltory is its ability to track your heart rate and stress levels. It does this by using your iPhone’s camera to track your heart rate. It then quickly generates insights about your heart rate variability (HRV). This may sound a bit invasive, but it’s actually really easy to use and provides accurate results.
At first, you might be confused by the difference between heart rate and HRV. While heart rate measures the number of beats per minute, HRV measures the difference in time between heartbeats, in milliseconds. This variance provides insights into the state of your autonomic nervous system, allowing you to analyse metrics such as your physiological stress levels.
To save me explaining exactly what HRV means, particularly in relation to Welltory, their website provides detailed information on the science behind HRV.
How Does Welltory Work?
The functioning of Welltory is based on the measurement of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) using two methods: photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG).
While HRV measurement is more complex than taking current heart rate or blood oxygen levels, Welltory accurately captures heartbeat intervals down to the millisecond. By placing your index finger on your phones camera and flash, PPG uses the flash on your phone to detect changes in blood volume and blood flow. This data is used to create a graph that registers the time between each heartbeat. ECG is used when the app is connected to BLE heart rate monitors such as Polar, Apple Watch, or Samsung HRM. Electric signals from the heart are detected to calculate HRV.
Welltory also provides personalised analytics and insights to help users gain a better understanding of their health. Depending on an individual’s unique data, the app can offer recommendations related to diet, exercise, and stress management.
How to Get Started with Welltory
Getting started is very easy. Once you have downloaded the app and gone through the quick set-up and introduction, you simply press the button to begin analysing your heart rate. By placing your finger over your camera and flash on your phone, the app will begin measuring your heart rate. After about one to two minutes, you’ll be presented with insights into your HRV, stress and energy levels.
It supports over 120 smart gadgets and apps, including Apple Watch, Fitbit, Nike+ Run Club, and more. Welltory can import health data, which gives you with a comprehensive understanding of how your HRV, stress, energy, and mental health are affected. It’s likely you will also need subscriptions to other apps to benefit from receiving all available health metrics. So cost can stack up depending on how comprehensive you want to be able to track your health through Welltory.
Favourite Welltory App Features and Insights
One of my favourite features of the app is how it works out what activities, time of day or locations improve your mood and lower your stress. For example, if you regularly run, cross train and attend a pilates class, you can see which activity makes you happier. Or you can understand which activity is more effective for reducing your stress levels and improving your sleep. The app will then provide personalised insights such as the most effective time to workout or how you can improve your sleep.
I like how the app provides simplified explanations of the results and analytics throughout the app. It helps to provide clarity and how to interpret the measurements.
The app also supports integration with various apps like MyFitnessPal, Pocket, and Todoist to help you stay on track with your goals. Plus, the personalised ‘my data’ feature gives you a bigger picture of your health and fitness journey, making it easy to see your progress. Particularly the ‘Health Journal’ which keeps a log of recordings to identify trends over time.
Who should use Welltory
Welltory is suitable for anyone who wants to monitor and understand their overall health, stress levels, and fitness. The app can be especially helpful for athletes, health enthusiasts, and people dealing with stress-related issues.
But I can’t help but feel that this app would be ideal for busy working professionals. I found the HRV and stress measurements the most useful analysis. So, I really think they’d benefit the most from keeping tabs on this health data.
Busy professionals are most likely to benefit from understanding what factors affect their stress both negatively and positively. Also, they will benefit from receiving the personalised insights that can help to keep stress under control. Furthermore, with time being a premium for busy professionals they can receive feedback and insight in very little time and check in on their HRV scores periodically.
What are the pro’s
- Welltory offers a user-friendly interface.
- It has an extensive list of supported gadgets and apps, and personalised insights based on your heart rate variability.
- The app provides detailed explanations of complex metrics. It also offers daily move plans and reminders to help you stay on track with your fitness goals.
- It helps to simplify the understand the significance of HRV, particularly in relation to the affects of daily stress levels.
What are the con’s
- Welltory requires a subscription to access some of its advanced features
- The user’s cost can further increase if they require paid subscriptions to other 3rd party app integrations to accumulate all relevant health data.
Provide a final verdict on Welltory
Overall, Welltory is an excellent app for anyone looking to take charge of their health and fitness. It offers a comprehensive approach to tracking and analysing your physical and emotional well-being. Also, providing personalised insights and guidance to help you reach your health goals. The app’s wide range of supported gadgets and apps makes it easy to integrate with your existing fitness routine. Furthermore, the user-friendly interface makes it easy to use and understand. While some users may find the abundance of data overwhelming, the app’s detailed explanations and daily move plans make it accessible for all levels of fitness enthusiasts. It is a recommended app particularly for busy working professionals who take an interest in their daily stress levels.
Download the app from the Apple Store and Google Play
