Keel: Bipolar Plan & Log support

Where Keel runs, and where it doesn't

Keel has not been released yet. This page is published ahead of the first release so that support and privacy are reachable before anyone is relying on the app, rather than after.

• iPhone only. There is no iPad layout, no Android build, no web version and no desktop version.
• United States only, for now. Every crisis number in the app — 988, 741741, 911 — is US-specific, and shipping to a country where those are the wrong numbers would put a wrong emergency number in front of someone in crisis. Other regions wait until localised crisis resources are ready.
• No account, so there is nothing to sign in to and nothing to transfer. A second device starts empty.
• Works fully offline. Aeroplane mode changes nothing about what the app can do.

Getting started

1. 1

   Answer the diagnosis question

   Keel asks whether a clinician has diagnosed you with bipolar I or bipolar II. Answering "Not yet diagnosed" or "Other or unsure" routes you out of the app with signposting towards assessment and crisis resources, and nothing is created or stored. This is deliberate: Keel is built on research done with diagnosed people, and it is not a screening tool.

2. 2

   Write your plan (six short steps)

   Your warning signs, what you intend to do when you notice them, who you intend to tell, and the name and number of your prescriber and your support person. The suggested signs are prompts only — nothing is pre-ticked, and "add your own" is always there, because the research this is built on works through a person's own idiosyncratic signs rather than a generic list.

3. 3

   Log a day

   Hours slept, bed and wake times, mood on a seven-point scale from severe low to severe elevation, whether you took your medication, which of your own warning signs showed up, and a one-line note. About a minute. Nothing is required, and you can edit or delete any entry later.

4. 4

   Read the note, if one appears

   When what you logged crosses a threshold you set, Keel shows one short note restating what you entered — "You logged 3 of your warning signs this week" — and offers you your own plan. At most one note at a time, only at the moment you save, and it is not stored anywhere.

5. 5

   Export before an appointment

   The Share tab produces a PDF or CSV covering the last 30 or 90 days. It needs at least seven days of entries first — a chart built from one or two days would give a misleading picture of a week.

Frequently asked questions

What Keel deliberately does not do

These are not missing features. Each one was considered and left out because the evidence did not support it, or because building it would harm the person using the app.

• It does not predict episodes. There is no model, no score and no forecast. No evidence shows that app-collected self-report predicts episodes at an individual level with acceptable precision, and a false positive here is harmful in itself.
• It does not diagnose, screen or rate severity. The note after a log restates what you entered; it never interprets it. "You logged 3 of your warning signs this week", never "you may be becoming hypomanic."
• It has no streaks, badges, celebration or nagging, and no "you missed a day" state. Engagement legitimately collapses during a depressive episode, and a product that punishes a missed day punishes the symptom. A gap in your data is never treated as evidence of anything.
• It sends no reminders and no notifications of any kind.
• It does no passive sensing. No location, no motion or step data, no screen-time or typing analysis, no Apple Health import, no wearable. The privacy cost is large and the evidence is preliminary.
• It has no mirror-image early-warning rule on the depressive side. Depressive prodromes are inconsistent and range from 2 to 365 days between people, so a short-window rule would mostly produce noise.
• It has no sync, no cloud backup and no way to move your log to another phone. That is the cost of holding nothing on a server, and it is stated plainly rather than hidden.
• It contains no advertising, no tracking and nothing for sale to anyone about you.

How the prescriber export works

A bipolar appointment is often fifteen minutes, and recall of the last month is unreliable — especially after an episode. The export exists so you can hand over a dated table instead of trying to remember. It is the same artefact as a paper life chart.

• Open the Share tab, choose 30 or 90 days and PDF or CSV, then tap Share. The file is generated on your device and handed to the standard iOS share sheet — Mail, Messages, Files, AirDrop, printing, or your clinic's portal. Where it goes is entirely your choice, and we never see it.
• It needs at least seven days of entries before it will generate.
• It contains what you entered — dates, sleep hours, bed and wake times, mood, medication, your warning signs, your notes — plus your plan. No scores, no risk ratings, no interpretation of any kind. A clinician reads your data, not our opinion of it.
• It also states the thresholds you had set, because a clinician needs to know what you were being shown in order to read your behaviour around it.
• It carries a disclaimer that cannot be removed: the entries are self-reported, and Keel does not diagnose, treat or predict.

The note after you save, and how to tune it

Keel shows at most one short note after a save, and only when your own logged data crosses one of your own thresholds. It restates the fact and offers your plan. It appears once, at that moment, and is not stored or reachable later.

• Three rules, in fixed priority order: a single very short night (bipolar I only); a run of short nights ending today; and the number of your warning signs logged across a rolling seven days.
• Defaults: 3 warning signs in 7 days, sleep under 6 hours, 3 consecutive short nights. Change them in Settings.
• The ranges are bounded — 2 to 5 signs, 5 to 7 hours, 2 to 4 nights — so the feature cannot be tuned into constant noise or permanent silence. The bounds are a clinical decision rather than a preference.
• For bipolar I there is one rule you cannot adjust: a night under four hours is always worth restating, because the consequence of a missed manic prodrome in bipolar I is materially worse than the cost of one extra note.
• If a note ever reads like a prediction, a diagnosis or a judgement, that is a bug in the app and we want to hear about it. Quote the exact wording in your email.

The Learn curriculum, and why it is not in the first release

A nine-lesson curriculum is drafted, sequenced for each diagnosis from a group psychoeducation programme. Only the crisis lesson has text that has been through review; the other eight are placeholders, waiting on a psychiatrist and a reviewer with lived experience to sign them off. Rather than ship eight unreviewed lessons, the tab is being held back from the first release. Nothing about crisis guidance depends on it: the crisis sheet is part of the app itself and stays one tap from every screen.

• Every lesson carries an evidence note stating what the research does and does not show, including that the evidence for psychoeducation is for group delivery rather than for an app. Those notes ship with the lessons, whenever the lessons do.
• There is no purchase in the app, no price and no subscription. If a paid tier is ever added, crisis resources and the 30-day export stay free and outside it.

Moving to a new phone

There is no sync and no cloud backup, so a new device starts empty. If you want to keep a record, export a PDF or CSV before you switch and save it somewhere you control. If you restore the new phone from an encrypted iCloud or local backup of the old one, Keel's data comes across as part of that backup, the same way other apps' data does — that backup is Apple's and yours, not ours.

If Keel cannot open its database

If storage fails, the app does not stop. It falls back to temporary in-memory storage and keeps running, so your crisis contacts and your plan stay reachable. Entries made in that state may not be saved. Losing a day's entry is bad; locking someone out of their crisis contacts is worse. If you see this, please get in touch — it should not happen.

What we would most like to hear about

Keel's tone is deliberate: no encouragement, no cheer, no emoji, no pressure. Tell us if anything in the app reads as cheerful, nagging, judgemental, or as pressure to keep a streak — and tell us if you find any screen where crisis resources are not one tap away. Those are the reports we act on first.

Troubleshooting

• Make sure you're running the latest version of Keel.
• Restart the app, and if needed, your device.
• Keel works entirely offline, so a connection problem is never the cause — if something isn't loading, it's a bug and we'd like to hear about it.
• If the export will not generate, check that you have at least seven days of entries. Below that it is held back deliberately, not broken.
• If Keel cannot open its database it falls back to temporary storage and keeps running, so your plan and the crisis resources stay reachable. Entries made in that state may not be saved — please get in touch if you see it.
• When you write in, the useful details are what you did, what happened, what you expected, your iPhone model and iOS version, and the Keel version. Please do not paste your log entries: we do not need them, and we would rather not have them.

Accessibility

If anything below is not true in practice for you, that is a bug and worth an email — accessibility problems are treated as defects, not requests.

• Every control has a screen-reader label and role, including the crisis sheet's call and text actions.
• Text follows your iOS text-size setting. Nothing in the app opts out of Dynamic Type.
• Light, dark and automatic appearance, matching your system setting by default.
• Meaning is never carried by colour alone. Mood always shows its label in words as well as its colour, and the palette avoids red and green on mood deliberately: red for elevation and green for balance would frame elevation as failure and remission as success. Elevated is a low-chroma ochre, low is a low-chroma slate.
• Controls are full-width rows and large touch targets rather than small icons.

The evidence behind Keel

Keel is built to one rule: no feature, and no sentence shown to a person, ships without a named clinical source behind it. These are the sources, with what each one does not show stated next to it — because the way a health app usually misleads is by borrowing the credibility of a stronger study than the one it actually rests on. The same notes appear inside the app, on every lesson and next to every rule.