Quiet patterns, on your terms.

VitaSine springs from the idea that our lives are governed by cyclic, repeating patterns. The idea is far from new, and most people will recognise that we have good days and bad days. Sometimes we know the exact reason for these days; sometimes it feels more arbitrary.

Going one step further, we are complex creatures and it is not always as simple as saying that today everything is nice. We may experience different emotions at the same time: physically we feel strong, but mentally we are not even prepared to go outside.

Or we may, on a given day, perform incredibly well in logical or intellectual tasks. Our memory can dig out anything, yet at the same time we feel completely exhausted after only a few steps on the treadmill. And on the other hand — who has not felt the euphoria of being mentally, physically and emotionally high all at once? It is a fantastic rush.

The theory of biorhythms says exactly this: we have ups and downs in different aspects of our humanity. The core ones are physical, emotional and intellectual.

Going one step further, biorhythm theory holds that we all share the same patterns, following very well-defined intervals — 23 days, 28 days and 33 days counted from the time of our birth. This means that, according to biorhythm theory, you can at any given instant calculate where a person sits on these three scales.

This has, however, never been proven scientifically, and biorhythms are today mostly treated with a healthy scepticism. The nature of logical proof also makes it very difficult to prove the opposite, so — as with many alternative views of health and life — we are left with a “maybe”.

VitaSine acknowledges this. Biorhythms may or may not hold up as a complete theory, but we can accept part of it: that we do experience ups and downs in cycles, and across the different aspects mentioned above. Perhaps the patterns are not as mathematical as the classical theory claims; perhaps we cannot simply look at a person’s age and tell where they are in their cycles.

Perhaps we have them, but they are not synchronised; at different points in our lives they may restart or take a jump. So what actually matters most is how we progress based on what has happened over the past days, weeks or months.

VitaSine therefore lets you report on these aspects. If you felt strong yesterday and even stronger today, you are probably in a rising pattern, and with enough reports it becomes possible to pin yourself to the correct position on the curve. With enough data, your three curves could actually predict the near- to mid-term future.

The idea to create this app came from team members playing chess and realising that, in cyclic patterns, the results were sometimes horrible and sometimes fantastic — stretching over several days or even weeks. Quite clearly indicating some sort of sine wave in performance. We also found that if yesterday was great, today had a good chance of being good too, sometimes even better.

And the same for a bad day: if we had a day where we lost five games in a row in incomprehensible blunders, the next day was usually not brilliant either.

Of course there is no scientific evidence, but the empirical experience of the team behind this app suggests it has merit.

This is, of course, not a tool with any guarantees. It is provided as a way to understand ourselves and perhaps glimpse the near future — not as a tool for the great decisions of life.

Either way, even if you find no distinguishable cyclic pattern, the app can be used as a mood calendar. The data can be exported, and in a future version we will consider sending the information to the Apple Health app (and, with your approval, also retrieving self-assessment reports from Apple Health).

In its current version the app runs without any server side, meaning all data gathered stays on your device. The authors cannot access it unless it is sent directly to us for troubleshooting or similar.

On that note, if you have ideas for features or things that do not work as expected, or if there are things that do not make sense, do not hesitate to send a comment or suggestion to us at info@tarsoul.se. If it is a good idea for a new feature, we will do our best to include it as soon as we can; if it is a malfunction, we will fix it as soon as possible.

Again — no user data is ever collected, processed or accessible by the team behind the app.