3 Applications That Have Kept Me Sane During This Pandemic
1. Ada
Ada is a medical app which helps you identify any possible medical condition by assessing your symptoms and their severity. They have recently added COVID-19 to its viruses database so, if you're ever worried about having caught it, you can use their symptoms assessment, which is basically a chat-like conversation with an AI, to record your symptoms and assure you until you get a chance to visit a doctor. Yes, you’ve read that correctly, even if it says you do not carry the virus, please do visit a doctor regardless, it's not worth the risk, Ada is just there to help you calm down in case your chances are low but it still does not equate consulting a professional face-to-face.
2. Youper
Youper might be one of my favourite apps to come across and, to this day, I am so thankful for it! Basically, Youper is another app that provides a chat-like conversation with an AI to asses your symptoms, the only difference from Ada is that Youper is designed for mental and psychological health. It first takes you through a character assessment to determine some major aspects of your personality. After that, it offers you checkups for anxiety, borderline personality disorder, depression, panic, PTSD and social anxiety that track your symptoms every 2 weeks to 1 month. Other than that, there's the AI; you can have a chat with it whenever about whatever you want, you can also type some of your replies or use it to journal and track your moods, it then develops a database of what affects each one of your moods that you can access at any time! Not to mention that it offers you meditations based on your talk with the AI and much more options!
3. Sleep
I don't think I need to explain what I use Sleep for. Sleep is an app with different types of meditation and mindfulness exercises to help you sleep at night. No matter how stressed out I am, Sleep seems to always know how to put me at ease! They offer multiple options, like Scenes; which are basically a variety of looping GIFs of -well- scenes that produce a calming effect, which you can couple with sounds from their Sound section; that's basically different sounds from all around us that you can mix together to create the most perfect harmony for you or choose from already-made mixes! Apart from Scenes and Sounds, there are the Meditations and Stories sections which are different audios starting with breathing exercises, followed by either a scene description or storytelling -respectively- to help you relax and, in Meditations, you can even choose your narrator! (Totally recommend listening to Michael Carnes narrating Hair Salon, by the way!)
Although I have been using these apps way before we've even heard of the coronavirus, they have been of great help to me dealing with it and life in general. From symptoms analysis to mental health tracking and mindfulness exercises, these apps offer everything we need to stay sane during this pandemic, and also pre-&-post-pandemic!