Pain Tracker & Diary

Review by eFreeware

Most symptom diaries ask you to type a number and move on. Pain Tracker & Diary asks you to draw. You pick a pain type, rate its intensity, then trace its shape on a front and back map of the body with your finger, and the app works out what share of your body surface that outline covers. That drawing is the heart of the app, and everything else is built around it.

It comes from Nanolume LLC and sits in the Medical category on Google Play. It costs $4.99, carries no ads and offers no in-app purchases, so the whole thing is a single purchase rather than a service you keep feeding. It has been on the store since early 2018, has passed 5,000 installs, and holds a 4.3 average from 91 ratings.

The app is for people living with pain that is ongoing and hard to describe in a sentence, and for the appointments where that description matters. If your pain shifts location, changes character or comes in several overlapping forms, a paragraph in a notes app tends to lose exactly the detail a clinician asks about. This is built for that gap.

Drawing pain instead of describing it

Each diary entry starts with a pain type. You can choose from a list the app provides or define your own, which matters if your condition has a name your doctor uses that isn't on anyone's default list. You then tap the icon of the type that is bothering you most at that moment, and you can return later to add others, so an entry doesn't have to be finished in one sitting.

Intensity is recorded on a numeric rating scale. Then comes the drawing: using your finger, you outline the area where that pain sits on a generalized body map, front and back. The app reports the percentage of body surface each outline covers, and the total across everything you have drawn. That percentage is the part I find most interesting, because it turns a vague sense of spread into a figure that can be compared from one week to the next.

Small areas are handled with a zoom control. A double tap magnifies the map twice, another double tap takes it to four times, and a third returns it to normal size, which is the sort of thing that matters when the pain is in a hand or a foot and a fingertip outline would otherwise be guesswork. Each open entry includes a small notepad for treatment or medication details.

Layers, saved entries and looking back

Pain rarely arrives as one clean sensation, and the app treats it that way. After drawing one type, you tap to add another and draw that as well, so a single entry can hold several layers, each with its own texture, intensity, location and area. When you tap Done, the app saves a snapshot of every layer together and stamps it with the date and time.

Reviewing is where the layering pays off. Open a saved entry by its date and time and you can inspect one pain type at a time, touching its icon to see where it sat and how intense it was, or switch to an all-layers view to see how the different types overlap. Swiping left and right moves between entries, which is a quick way to see whether the same region keeps coming back.

Two features cover the days you forget. You can recreate a pain picture from memory and use the calendar to backdate it, so the record stays continuous even when you didn't log at the time. You can also copy an earlier entry or edit a copy of it, which saves redrawing a pattern that hasn't changed much.

Turning entries into something a doctor can read

A diary only helps if it can leave the app. Charts give you a summary of what you have recorded, and an animation plays your data across any period you choose by setting start and stop dates, showing how your pain types shift over that stretch. Watching a flare build and fade as a moving picture is a different experience from scanning a list of numbers.

For appointments, the app exports charts, drawings and notes as a PDF file, and it can also export a numeric CSV file you can email or save and open in a spreadsheet. The PDF is the obvious thing to hand over or attach to a message before a consultation; the CSV suits anyone who wants to sort, graph or archive the raw figures themselves.

The developer is clear about where the information lives: entries are stored on your device and are not collected or stored by Nanolume LLC. For a record of this kind, that is a meaningful design choice, and it means the export step is also how the data travels anywhere else.

What you need before the first entry

Logging an entry follows a simple flow: choose a pain type, set intensity, draw the outline, add optional notes, then save. The only preparation is deciding what your pain types are, and the custom option covers anything the predefined list misses.

The one requirement worth planning around is the drawing itself. Outlining an area accurately with a finger takes a little care, and the zoom control exists precisely because small regions are fiddly at normal size. The app is also built around your own recall: backdating and copy functions help, but the value of the record depends on how consistently you add to it.

A recent update tidied the notes field, aligning text to the top left and keeping long entries visible rather than letting the keyboard cover them. It is a small housekeeping change rather than a new capability, but it points at a notepad people evidently use at length.

The people this suits

This is a tool for someone managing pain that is chronic, layered and hard to put into words, and who sees a clinician often enough that a written record would change the conversation. The drawing model rewards that person, because the location and spread of pain are exactly the details that get lost in a hurried appointment.

It also fits anyone who wants to judge whether a treatment is helping. Recording intensity, area and type before and after a change gives you something to compare, and the charts and animation are aimed at that kind of before-and-after reading. The developer's stated hope is that patterns emerge from an integrated record that would otherwise go unnoticed.

It is a paid, single-purchase app in a category where free alternatives exist, and the price is the main barrier to trying it. For someone who needs a precise, comparable record of where and how much something hurts, the drawing and surface-area calculation are the reason to pay it. For a person who simply wants to note that today was a bad day, that level of detail is more than the job requires.

A considered buy for a detailed pain record

Pain Tracker & Diary does one job with unusual specificity: it lets you draw what you feel, quantify how much of you it covers, and carry that record into a consultation as a PDF or spreadsheet.

The trade-offs are straightforward. It costs $4.99 up front, it asks for a few minutes of careful drawing per entry, and it is a record-keeping tool rather than anything that treats or diagnoses. Its 4.3 average from 91 ratings, with more than 5,000 installs since 2018, suggests a small but settled audience rather than a mass-market one, which is what I would expect for an app this focused.

If you live with ongoing pain and want your care team to see its shape, spread and intensity rather than hear a summary of it, this is a reasonable purchase. If your needs are lighter, a plain notes app will do.

What's new in version 4.18.0

Text entries in Notes will now be aligned to the top left, and long entries will not be obscured by the keyboard.