I've been using Visible with the Polar Verity Sense armband now for just over a month - my first day with the armband was 6th Oct.
The cost was £131.88 (£11 per month) for 1 years membership of Visible Plus (the paid version of Visible, which you need in order to be able to use the armband), and £50 for the armband. It does seem a bit pricey, given that (I believe) Visible Plus is still in the beta stage (development stage), so we're being asked to pay to beta test a product, which someone else will intend to make a profit from!
I went ahead with it anyway as I was keen to try something that might help me in any way, and also keen to contribute information / data to something that could help ME sufferers generally, even though it does feel weird to pay to do so.
Overall so far I've actually found Visible Plus, with the armband, to be much more helpful than the standard free version without the armband.
The armband is monitoring my heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) constantly, other than when I'm sleeping - when I'm sleeping the armband is charging in its charger, although it actually charges very quickly.
The app categorizes your heart rate into 3 zones - rest, exertion and over-exertion. It sets the boundaries between each zone according to information from the Workwell Foundation, but you can adjust the boundaries if you need to. I'll put some screenshots at the end of the post as it looks like the pictures are going to be huge when I include them and I'm not sure how to make them smaller.
As the app is tracking your heart-rate over the whole day, you can see in real-time both when specific activities cause your heart-rate to go up or down, and also how it has fluctuated over the course of the day.
The central feature is the "Pace Points" budget. Pace Points are like your energy currency. The more energy you are using - the more "Pace Points" you are spending. A day where you don't move at all will use very few Pace Points, a day where you are very active will use many.
The idea is that you set yourself a Pace Points budget - which is the number of Pace Points / amount of energy or exertion you can safely use in a given day without causing PEM or symptom exacerbation of any kind. You're directed to spend 4 days using the app and armband without a Pace Points budget when you first get them, and by seeing how many Pace Points you use over those 4 days, you can then set a budget for yourself. You can adjust this budget at any time.
As I understand it, this feature is intended to make the concept and implementation of "pacing" much less vague and much more defined and easy to follow.
In the same way that a mobile banking app can track your spending so you can see in real-time if you're going over budget.
This has been incredibly useful for me as before I struggled with pacing - I found it basically impossible to measure and keep track of my energy useage/exertion in any meaningful, precise or useful way, I just had a general sense that I was always doing too much.
In the first 2 or 3 weeks of using the app - I MASSIVELY reduced my normal level of daily activity. (Which was already very low).
This was partly made possible as I started using Visible Plus at the same time as finding out my 2nd PIP application was successful - which actually made it possible for me to cut down the amount I was working hugely.
I hadn't been able to seriously attempt pacing before as I had been unable to stop working for financial reasons!
As I'm self-employed, it has been relatively straight-forward for me to simply reduce the amount of work I take on.
Being able to stay within my Pace Points budget for those 2/3 weeks did seem to very quickly lead to very small but very noticeable improvements in my health & symptoms. I was sleeping better and longer, was able to almost completely stop using painkillers, sometimes had slightly longer windows in the morning morning during which my symptoms were slightly milder, and had a general sense of very slight but real improvement.
I also felt much more stable health-wise, the apparent randomness in severity of symptoms from day to day became much less, and I felt more "in control" - if I stayed within my budget on a given day - I would usually not feel any worse the following day.
This is after a slow but steady worsening of symptoms and M.E generally over the last 5 years or so - during which I had been consistently working too much and unable to pace or stay within safe limits.
Unfortunately about 2 weeks ago I caught some kind of bug, possibly covid, immediately followed by terrible terrible food poisioning, probably the worst food poisoning I've ever had, which definitely stopped any feeling of progress or even stability health-wise!
I'm still recovering from all of that, hoping I can get somewhere stable again soon.
It was interesting to see that with the food poisoning, on the day immediately following a night of throwing up and running to the toilet all night, and therefore not sleeping much, my heart-rate stayed at around 105-110bpm for the entire day, even though I was laying flat in bed all day except for when I got up to go the toilet.
So on that day, I ended up going about 4x over my Pace Points budget, just from the energy / exertion my body was using to whatever it needs to do when you have food poisoning. (My normal resting heart rate is around 62bpm).
Aside from food poisoning, it's been really interesting noticing when and by how much my heart rate jumps up - basically any time I'm standing or even sitting as opposing to laying horizontally in bed - my heart-rate is significantly higher.
Sitting at a desk doing intellectual work, or talking to a friend on the phone and having a good laugh show as using much more energy - consistently higher heart-rate - than laying on my bed with my laptop on my bed-desk watching TV.
I suppose this shouldn't be surprising, but the extent of the difference has really struck me.
The morning stability score also now tracks much more closely to how I actually feel when I wake up in the morning, and then how I go on to feel over the rest of the day, which is interesting and useful. I suppose in a fairly "gamified" way, I'm now really keen to pace really extensively, rest basically all the time, and see if I can get a run of sweet green 5s in the morning stability score.
I'm also now actually doing the evening symptom check-in almost every day (which I wasn't before), as now that the data I'm collecting feels more accurate and precise, I'm more curious to see if there will be correlations between me resting more and pacing better, and trends in symptoms severity.
Overall I've found Visible Plus to be unexpectedly useful and positive - those tiny improvements that I felt from actually pacing in quite an extreme way have given me a lot of motivation to keep doing that, as the feeling of just experiencing slightly less symptoms and feeling slightly less like utter shit in my body all the time is so alluring, based on the little glimpses I've had so far.
Screenshots below.
