​I first got my Visible armband almost a year ago and it’s working really well for me, Before I got it I was having crashes for days, maybe weeks, at a time. In the first month or two I still had crashes because I was learning how to use it, adjusting settings and so on, but probably for the last 6 months I haven’t had a big crash. In the last three or four months there hasn’t been a single day when I couldn’t get out of bed.

 

Visible has definitely had a bigger effect than anything else I’ve tried.

It’s been life-changing for me because pacing is really the most simple thing you can do for ME, but it’s also very difficult to understand how much energy you’re using, For me it’s easier to look at numbers and say, OK this clearly states that I’m doing too much, whereas if I had to go purely based on feel it’s really hard to know, say if I’ve spent three minutes washing the dishes, that I should sit down afterwards.

 

You can set Visible up to send an alert on your phone. I have it set up to show an alert every two minutes if my heart rate is up, so when I’m in my over-exertion zone I’ll get a notification on my phone telling me it’s been two minutes and I should slow down - and often I will! If I’m doing something, say I’m walking somewhere and I get an alert that I’m in my over-exertion zone, I might go up to eight minutes in the over-exertion zone. That’s the maximum I’ve ever gone up to in the year I’ve been using Visible.

 

I was spending a lot of energy in the shower

Visible helped me discover I was spending a lot of energy in the shower and that was causing me to be really tired, which gave me the idea to use a stool in the shower when I wash my hair. I can see from the data that I use less than half the energy like that - so Visible can help you see how small changes and tools can help you, you can physically see the difference on a chart.

 

I wear it all day, I don’t wear it while I sleep, although Visible are updating the app so that in the future it will be able to monitor you overnight. But currently I put it on as soon as I wake up and I do this thing called Morning Stability, it measures how well you’re doing that morning. If I score a 1 out of 5 I know to take it easy that day, not to push myself, whereas if I have a 5 out of 5 I know I’m doing pretty well that day and I can go about doing what I planned to do.

 

You can look at it over time to see how things are changing. 

Every evening I record my symptoms on the Visible app on my phone. You do have to set it up, which takes a bit of time, but once that’s done you’re literally just clicking down a list, it takes maybe a minute to do, it’s very quick. You can say if you had nausea, if you had body pain, fatigue, lots of different things. And if you’re using supplements you can add the supplements you’re using and record whether you took them that day. And you can look at it over time to see how things are changing. ​