My Circadian Clock

Salk Institute

About this app

My circadian clock app is for use in research studies examining how diet, exercise and sleep affect health and healing. Our body contains circadian (circa – approximately and dian – day) or 24 h clocks that determines the time to sleep, feel hungry or get ready for physical activity. Research studies run in different locations are trying to understand the interaction between “how much” and “when” we sleep, eat or exercise for better health. You need an activation code from these research studies to download and use the app.


Following are the key features:

- Camera function to snap picture of everything you eat or drink
- Sleep tab to record time to bed and time of waking up
- Exercise tab to log physical activity
- Personalized food menu
- Health tab to log and monitor health parameters
- Medication reminders
- Feedback with the research coordinator

Following are the new features:

- Tag Later Button : Now when you take a picture you have the option to tag it at a later time.
- Health Tracking : Now you can track your results for a wide variety of vitals and blood tests. You can now also log in metric units.
- Daily tracking and study status info on the home page : With a quick glance at the homepage you can see your daily Feedogram, step counts, exercise for the week, last nights sleep, and where you are in the study.
- Step Counts : Now you can see all of step counts from Apple Health on the app!
- Settings : Now, you can set your eating, sleeping, and exercise targets in one place. You can also set reminders, eating time notifications, and what you view on your homepage from the settings page.
- Improved user experience : The myCircadianClock app has been redesigned to make it easier and more enjoyable to use.

Ratings and reviews

The app boasts a good UI that's both intuitive and user-friendly. Once the baseline period is established, it provides insightful analysis that has been immensely helpful. I'm particularly pleased to know that my data is being used for research purposes and not sold to third parties. The absence of ads and the fact that all educational materials are freely accessible make it even more commendable. Highly recommended!

As stated by most of the other reviews, I am severely disappointed by this application. I watched the TedTalk that mentioned this app and was super excited to try it, for myself and to contribute to research. However, the interface is simply unusable and infuriating. This application must be completely redesigned or majorly improved if you hope to receive data from your users. I recommend modeling it after an app like MyFitnessPal. The interface is simple and user-friendly, you can look back on your input history, and receive instant results. I completed the two-week baseline period for My Circadian Clock and was hoping the app would work better after I was finished but it does not. I am uninstalling the application with the hope that it will be greatly improved and I can redownload it at a later date.

I have used this app for six months. It tracks many aspects of diet, exercise, lab results, and sleep, but is most efficient in doing what it was originally designed for -- helping to track and manage intermittent fasting patterns. For that, I have not found a better app. I stopped using the sleep tracker after about 3 months, as it is not as well designed as other trackers, and has minor bugs, such as difficulty in editing a record which covers the end of a month.

What's new

Bug fixes & improvements!