Millions of people in the UK live with chronic conditions like hypertension, heart arrhythmia, or respiratory problems. For many of them, regular monitoring is part of managing their health. But consistent monitoring only works if there's a reliable way to record what you measure.
The problem is that most people rely on memory, or scribble readings on scraps of paper that disappear before the next GP appointment. The result is a conversation with a clinician that is based on a single snapshot reading taken in a surgery, rather than a real picture of how your numbers behave day to day.
What a log actually tells you
Blood pressure, for example, is highly variable. It rises with stress, exercise, caffeine, and time of day. A single reading taken while you're anxious in a waiting room says very little. A week's worth of morning and evening readings, logged with notes about what you were doing, tells your GP something genuinely useful.
The same is true for heart rate and oxygen saturation. For anyone managing a cardiac condition or recovering from an illness, a trend over time is far more informative than any individual data point. Logging consistently is what turns raw numbers into a pattern.
The barrier is complexity, not effort
We looked at the options available to someone who wants to keep a simple health log, and most of them get in the way of the thing they're supposed to help with. They want an account. They sync to a cloud you've never heard of. They show you graphs you didn't ask for, or lock basic features behind a subscription.
In our experience the barrier to consistent tracking is not that people are unwilling to do it. It's that the tools available make it harder than it should be. If recording a reading takes thirty seconds and four taps, people do it. If it involves logging into an app, waiting for a sync, and finding the right screen, they stop.
What we built, and why
Vitals started from a simple question: what would a health logging app look like if it removed everything that wasn't strictly necessary? No account. No sync. No subscription. No ads. Just a clean form, a reliable history, and the ability to export your data in whatever format your doctor can use.
The notes field turned out to be one of the most important decisions we made. Being able to write "after 30 minutes sitting down" or "stressed this week" next to a reading transforms the data from a number into a story. That context is exactly what makes a health log useful to a clinician.
Simple tools, used consistently, make a real difference. That's the idea behind Vitals, and it's the idea behind everything we build.