Nobody likes being ill, but thanks to software, nowadays we have a series of better options and tools to ease the process of logging our health. When it comes to heart attacks and related issues, obviously the first thing to measure is the blood pressure. It lays out the overall situation of our body and is a good measure to compare the health over time. Most people who need to check their blood pressure over a longer period of time use paper notebooks or little post-its for that — at some point this method is doomed to result in chaos. To ease up this process of archiving blood pressure results and to allow for easy comparisons, Peter Bajtala and Matt Ludzen developed Bloodnote for iPhone.
Bloodnote is designed as minimalist and simple as possible and does not need any big tutorial or explanation for its feature set. It saves your blood pressure results for later and you can fetch them again, whenever you like or need to. It features the standard division into systolic and diastolic pressure as well as the pulse frequency. You can flick through the past results and view them with a single tap. These are basically all features the app has to offer; they’re certainly useful, but when reviewing Bloodnote for a design series, it’s much more interesting to analyze how these features are embedded into the app’s UI.
The three values are displayed using differently colored (red, blue and green), nearly full circles. The whole app is — besides the colored circles — designed in various shades of beige, and within the circle, a darker area is indicating optimal results as a benchmark. A legend at the bottom of the screen connects the color to their respective values (red for systolic, blue for diastolic pressure and green for pulse frequency). Tapping and holding one of them dims the colors of the other circles to focus on one specific value. To enter a new value, you just tap the respective circle, drag up or down until the indicator (which automatically pops up) shows the right value. The dragging interaction is sensitive and pretty smooth, and it’s very easy to get exactly your currently measured value. Tapping the date indicator at the top brings up a slide calendar to move to a specific date in the past and take a look at the respectively measured results.
Bloodnote is a really thought-out iPhone app. Its design just serves the functionality and makes it both simple and — if you can say that — fun to a certain extent as well. It makes recognizing the different values as well as changes over time very easy, and therefore is a very good and time-saving way to enter and archive blood pressure results. You can get Bloodnote for $1.99 on the App Store.
