Stay Fitter and Feel Better with these 10 Amazing Health Apps

We use technology every day to help with our learning and, to be honest, we would be pretty lost without it. After only about a decade, smartphone technology is so successful that businesses and their employees have trouble imagining a day without them.

Besides making phone calls, nearly all smartphones today can natively provide directions through GPS, take pictures, play music and keep track of appointments and contacts. It can make you stay fitter and feel better too- through health apps!

A quick glance at the categories section in App Store (or in Google Play) will show you that there are more than 40,000 medical apps. With apps that are now able to check and monitor your blood sugar, it is clear that these apps are popular and seem to work.

Let’s get an access to a technological wonderland and know the 10 best health apps that can help us stay fit and feel better all the time.

1) British National Formulary Mobile App

The BNF contains information on thousands of medicines – their indications, contra-indications, side-effects, doses and much more. When a doctor uses it, instead of being contained in an ever-increasingly large book, this little app saves time and space and improves patient safety by making sure that they prescribe the right medicine to their patients.

2) NHS Choices Drinks Tracker

It does what it says. You enter what you drink and it calculates this into units of alcohol. It helps track how much one is drinking and gives free personalized feedback. Using it often leads to reducing consumption – as the harsh reality of how much one drinks is brought home.

3) Instant Heart Rate Monitor

For those fitness addicts who need instant affirmation of their fitness, this app is for you. Just touching the camera lens with your finger gives you your pulse rate.

4) The Walk-Game

You're told a bomb has exploded at Inverness station and you have to transport a package the length of the UK by foot to save the world. The app is being evaluated by King's College London to see its effectiveness in increasing walking in patients with rheumatoid problems. Anything that gets a person walking – given the obesity epidemic we face, must be a good thing.

5) Sleep Cycle

This app monitors sleep pattern, tells you how long you are in deep sleep and how long in light sleep. It tells you how many hours you actually are asleep – which are a lot longer than many patients think, and it wakes you up in the lightest phase of sleep so you can start the day feeling relaxed and rested.

6) The Big White Wall

This provides users with online support for mental health problems. It provides a safe space to share experiences and get support – from real (not virtual) people. The site is monitored 24/7 by moderators.

7) Diabetes Risk Checker

Developed by UK doctors and academics, this app works out your risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the next 10 years by asking you a series of simple questions. Being able to predict if you are at a risk of diabetes, should lead to a change in your lifestyle.

8) Sliders

Sliders allows you to track how you feel about your wellbeing, energy levels, sleep etc, using questions you can set yourself and simple sliders to input the answers. It then creates graphs that give you some insight into your highs and lows.

9) Phobia Free

This app aims to cure users of arachnophobia. It uses "systematic desensitization," which involves mainly showing sufferers a series of picture of spiders. Created with the help of a psychiatrist, the app has recently been approved by the NHS.

10) Headache Diary Pro

It enables you to track your headaches: when they start and end, how severe they are, which area of the head you feel them and which medication you take. This can help build up a picture of what triggers them and how you might change your behavior to reduce them. This app is recommended by the NHS – its Health Apps Library is also a good place when looking for medical apps.

The majority of medical or health apps are harmless — if used in the correct way. They are great educational tools, but the trick is to only use them as a reference and not in place of a trained medical professional.

Read more articles on Health Apps.