Wellness Apps

Use this list of free and low-cost mobile apps to help you pursue your wellness goals — right from the convenience and privacy of your smartphone.

Physical Wellness Apps

  • Sworkit: Pick cardio, strength, yoga, or stretching workouts, and how much time you have (five minutes to an hour), and Sworkit walks you through the session with videos and guided voice cues. (For $5 a month, you can talk to a trainer, too.)
  • C25k: Even couch potatoes can work up to running a 5K with this realistic, well-paced program. The app offers an 8-week training schedule (three workouts a week) that’s designed specifically for non-runners to develop endurance and strength. You alternate between walking and running, and by the end of the eight weeks, you’re running the 5K you never thought was possible.

Sleep wellness apps

  • Sleepbot: Diagnose your sleep deficit and wake up refreshed with this app. A motion tracker and sound recorder work with your phone to monitor how long you take to fall asleep, how many hours you’re getting, how restless you are, and what’s interrupting your Z’s. The smart alarm rings when you’re in a light-sleep-stage cycle, a healthy time to get up.

Meditation apps

  • Calm: Calm is currently working on its Schools Initiatives. Visit their website for a guide to Introducing Mindfulness to Schools.
  • Headspace Meditation App: The Headspace app provides access to hundreds of themed meditations to help you with stress, compassion, self-esteem relationships, sleep and productivity. Through Headspace’s Educator initiative, you can register for the paid version of the Headspace app for free. Click the following link and provide your IOTA Community Schools email to start a new account or merge your existing Headspace account: https://www.headspace.com/

Financial Wellness Apps

  • PocketGuard: PocketGuard is an all-in-one bank account tracking and budget management app that shows you how much you’ve got in your accounts, as well as how much you can afford to spend for the day. The app connects to your bank and card accounts through an encrypted, read-only connection, allowing you to quickly view the status of your accounts and transactions while remaining secure. The app automatically sorts your purchases, subscriptions, and bill payments, and factors in your previous spending factors to provide you an estimate as to how much you can safely spend from your accounts without going into the red.
  • Wally: This budget-tracking app has undergone a serious makeover with Wally Next. The updated version provides you with budget- and expense-tracking tools for free, with a wealth of extra features available through premium subscriptions. Users sign in with their email address and can then set a savings target and daily budget, log expenses and income, track expenses over time, set reminders for bills, and more, all presented in a timeline feed or in a calendar. Premium subscription packages add features like group budget tracking, foreign accounts and currency conversions, and other features. Bank account syncing isn’t available, though, so Wally Next will require a bit more manual tracking on your part.
  • Spendee: This app features a brightly colored, user-friendly interface that comes with great budget-tracking tools, whether you’re a free user or a subscriber. Users can easily input and categorize expenses, complete with receipts and photos. You also can quickly view your expenses in a feed view, while the Overview mode offers useful infographics on your spending over time plus a breakdown of what items and categories you’re spending your money on. Spendee has also added a budget-creation tool, elevating it from expense tracker to proper budgeting app. Premium users get even more, with bank account syncing for automatic expense logging, as well as multiple budgets, shareable savings wallets, and cross-device syncing.