Contact StressScan Support

I have been using this app for a couple of days and I’m a constant stressor and a way for me to cope with my stress and anxiety is to acknowledge that it isn’t all in my head so I thought this app would be great to help me recognize my high stress levels and to see at what points of the day I’m most stressed. The idea behind this app is great but it has one major flaw upon which the whole app is structured. The finger scan. While it’s incredibly intelligent to use the light in one’s fingertip to tell their bpm I think it’s nearly impossible for someone’s bpm to go from 149 to 23 in seconds... even when I’m as still as possible the scanner fluctuates from mid 100s to low 20s-50s or will tell me it can’t scan because my finger moved or isn’t on the scanner yet I’m pushing my finger down so hard that the camera leaves an indent in my finger. Good idea, poor execution.

This just measures heart rate (which does well and is actually kind of cool, using the camera) and does a straight correlation to stress level. In other words, it interprets a high heart rate as high stress and a low heart rate as low stress. But stress isn’t that simple. A high heart rate could just mean you’re out of shape. For example, I have a very low heart rate, and it gave me a stress level of 1/100. This is absolutely ridiculous, as I downloaded the app specifically because I’m a heartbeat away from a meltdown because of the intense stress I’ve been under for a couple months (and I thought the app might quantify it; I like data). This is a useful app if you just want to track heart rate or if you want to track your subjective stress levels (nice record keeping ability for that), but it’s useless for objective stress measurements.

I took my “stress level” the moment I woke up and it said I had a high stress level of 72. Moments later, literally 3 minutes later, after coming out of the bathroom brushing my teeth and sitting on my bed, I took my “stress level” again. It now tells me my stress level is low at 43. How could it change so drastically within 3 minutes? Yesterday I took it literally a minute and a half apart. It went from 50 to 66. You’re not going to tell me this thing is accurate in accounting for stress. Heartbeat? Sure. But totally not stress.