Using Migraine Buddy and a nervous-system tracker together: the diary and the layer underneath it

Short answer

Keep the diary. If Migraine Buddy already holds your attacks — when they started, how bad they were, what you took — there is no reason to move that record. It has the deepest attack log in this category and the largest user base, and nothing below argues for replacing it.

What a diary cannot hold is what your body was doing in the days before you noticed anything: resting heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV) and sleep, collected while you were asleep or busy or not thinking about migraine at all. Two records of the same week, written by two different authors — you, and your autonomic nervous system. Running both means two logs instead of one, with no data flowing between them: you line them up by date, by hand.

If you have kept a careful diary for months and still cannot say what sets your attacks off, that is not your fault and not a failure of attention. The research says the same from the other direction: several things people name as triggers turn out to be the attack already starting, and the days you would need to compare in order to prove a trigger almost never occur naturally. You are not imagining the pattern you can feel but cannot pin down — a layer of the record is missing, and it was never in the diary to begin with.

For the whole category side by side, see the full comparison. This article is about one pairing — an attack diary plus a nervous-system tracker — and how to run them together without fooling yourself.

Note: this article compares consumer apps and explains published research. It is not medical advice. Migraine is diagnosed and treated by a clinician, no app here is a medical device, and none can tell you an attack is coming. A sudden, severe or new kind of headache needs urgent care — red flags are further down.

What does Migraine Buddy actually record, and what is it good at?

Everything here was checked on the company's own pages and store listings on 6 October 2026. Features change, so check the listing before relying on any of it.

It records the attack in detail. The App Store listing describes recording pain location, intensity and duration, triggers and symptoms, relief methods and medications, with automatic sleep tracking and weather data (pressure and temperature). The Google Play listing adds that it helps you "uncover potential links between your sleep patterns and the onset of migraines." The structure is the point: an entry here is not a free-text note, it is a form with fields a neurologist recognises.

It is built around the appointment. The company's page for clinicians says "Migraine Buddy collects relevant data points on migraine and headache attacks for your consultations," and that patients "can export and send their Migraine Impact Report (MIRs) before each consultation." There are two export shapes — a diary export and the structured Migraine Impact Report — both shareable as PDFs. Few consumer health apps are designed backwards from a ten-minute clinic visit; this one is.

It has the scale. The company's site states the app is "Used by 4.8 million users" with "4.8 out of 250k ratings." Google Play shows 1M+ downloads and 4.8 stars from 67.1K reviews, last updated 23 September 2026; the iOS listing shows 4.8 from 42,000+ ratings. A large, long-running user base is why the symptom and trigger pickers are as complete as they are.

It was built with headache specialists. The clinician page names Peter Goadsby, David Dodick and Stephen Silberstein among the clinical leaders involved. The developer is listed as Voluntis on the App Store and Aptar Digital Health (AptarGroup) on Google Play; the iOS copyright line reads "© 2015-2025 Aptar Digital Health LLC."

Free, with a paid tier. The app is free to download and lists in-app purchases — a Monthly Plan, an Annual Plan and a Two-Month Subscription. The paid tier is MBplus, which per its own page adds a 7-day weather forecast with humidity and pressure, advanced tracking of cycle, pressure variation and sleep in relation to attacks, advanced reporting of weather and of triggers against symptoms and pain location, coaching programmes, the Good Days Guide, and — on iOS — smart symptom and trigger suggestions, plus an "Attack Duration" estimate showing, "based on your recorded attacks," how long a current attack may last. Note what that is: an estimate about an attack already underway, not a forecast of one to come.

If your question is "what is the best migraine tracker app for logging attacks," Migraine Buddy is a serious answer. Depth of attack record, report quality and user base are three places where it leads, and none of that needs qualifying.

What can an attack diary not show, however carefully you keep it?

A diary records what you noticed, in the words you had, at the moment you were able to type — with four structural blind spots that no amount of diligence closes.

It starts when you notice. The prodrome, the early phase that can begin hours or days before the pain, is the part most people cannot log, because logging it means having already recognised it. In the PRODROME trial screening period, Schwedt and colleagues enrolled 920 adults who said they could reliably identify their own prodrome and recorded 4,802 qualifying events over 60 days. The most common symptoms were sensitivity to light (57.2%), fatigue (50.1%), neck pain (41.9%), sensitivity to sound (33.9%), difficulty thinking or concentrating (30.0%) and dizziness (27.8%); 81.5% of logged events were followed by headache within one to six hours. Two caveats: participants were selected for already recognising their prodrome, and the trial was funded by a drug manufacturer.

How many people have a prodrome at all is far less certain. A 2022 meta-analysis by Eigenbrodt and colleagues estimated at least one premonitory symptom in 29% of people with migraine in population samples and 66% in clinic samples — with heterogeneity at I² 99%, high risk of bias in 20 of the included studies, and a conclusion that the evidence does not support a reliable prevalence estimate. The phase your diary cannot reach is a phase the literature is still arguing about.

Some of what you log as a cause is already an effect. In a 2021 study of 53 people, Karsan and colleagues compared self-reported triggers against the early symptoms of the same people's attacks. Bright light agreed with premonitory light sensitivity, skipped meals and specific foods with premonitory food cravings, and stress with mood change early in attacks triggered under laboratory conditions. Craving chocolate and then getting a migraine does not establish that the chocolate did it. More in your migraine trigger might be the migraine already starting.

Entries drift towards the moment you wrote them. In a BMJ study, Stone and colleagues gave 80 adults with chronic pain paper or electronic diaries. Paper users reported 90% compliance; measured compliance was 11%, against 94% for electronic diaries. An app diary largely solves this — a real advantage Migraine Buddy has over a notebook. What it cannot solve is that an entry written at 4pm about a bad morning is still a reconstruction.

One attack is not an experiment. This is the deepest limit. To compare a day with wine against a day without, you need two otherwise similar days. Houle and Turner looked for them: across four years of weather data and a median of 89 days of stress and hormone data in nine regularly cycling people, days meeting a 90% similarity threshold occurred a median of 2.3 times per year for weather, about 1.5 days a month for stress and about 2.0 days a month for ovarian hormones. Candidate triggers vary too much for "natural experimentation" to produce the comparison you need.

That is why a careful diary can leave you no wiser about causes after a year. The method has a ceiling, and the ceiling is low.

Why do the 24 to 48 hours before an attack matter?

Because when that window has been measured with instruments rather than memory, the signal has repeatedly sat there rather than on the day of the attack itself.

The sleep result is the clearest example, and it is counterintuitive. Bertisch and colleagues followed 98 adults with episodic migraine for six weeks with twice-daily electronic diaries and wrist actigraphy — 4,406 days and 870 reported headaches. Sleep of 6.5 hours or less was not associated with migraine on the day after the sleep period (day 0) or the day after that (day 1), and poor subjective sleep quality was not associated either. What was associated was diary-reported low sleep efficiency, with 39% higher odds of headache on day 1 — the second day, not the next morning (odds ratio 1.39, 95% CI 1.06–1.81). Actigraphic high fragmentation was associated with lower odds on day 0.

"I slept badly and got a migraine" is the sentence everyone says. The measured association ran a day later than that, and short sleep — the thing most diaries record — did not predict anything. A record that starts when you notice the pain cannot see a 48-hour lag. A record that runs continuously can at least contain it.

Two bad days in a row look different from one. Houle and colleagues reanalysed 28 days of diary data from 33 people with chronic migraine and 22 with chronic tension-type headache. Two consecutive days of high stress or low sleep strongly predicted headache; two days of low stress or adequate sleep were protective; when the two days disagreed, risk rose only if the earlier day was the bad one. That is a chronic-headache sample, so do not transplant the numbers — but the unit that mattered was a two-day window, not a day.

Your profile is probably not anyone else's. Peris and colleagues applied individual-level analysis to 326 people who kept paper diaries for 90 days across 33 possible factors. They produced a factor-attack profile for 87% of participants, averaging four associated factors each, and among those with any association the profile was unique in 85% of cases. A published trigger list tells you what to consider, not what applies to you.

What a nervous-system tracker adds to that window is not insight. It is coverage: resting heart rate, HRV and sleep recorded with no act of noticing required. For what the research does and does not show about HRV in migraine, see migraine and your nervous system.

Do Migraine Buddy and Welltory talk to each other?

No. Checked on 6 October 2026: neither app names the other anywhere in its store listing, help centre or public site. There is no sync, no shared account and no import. If you run both, you join them up yourself, by date.

Migraine Buddy's own connections. The iOS listing states "Migraine Buddy optionally integrates with the Health app for a holistic health view" and, separately, "MBplus subscribers can now connect Apple Health with Migraine Buddy for sleep and other health data." The Google Play listing states it "optionally integrates with Health Connect for a holistic health view" and does not mention HRV or heart rate at all. The iOS listing also states "Oura Ring users can now sync menstrual cycle data into Migraine Buddy, along with sleep data." Note what is named: cycle and sleep.

There is a broader announcement, worth separating from what shipped. On 6 January 2026 Aptar Digital Health announced a collaboration with Oura "to advance migraine insights by connecting Migraine Buddy with Oura Ring," describing biometrics including "sleep, heart rate variability, temperature trends, cycle insights, and more." The release gives no launch date, no markets and no statement about which tiers it covers, and as of 6 October 2026 the App Store listing still describes the Oura sync as cycle plus sleep data. Neither store listing mentions HRV, so we could not confirm that HRV from an Oura ring is available inside Migraine Buddy today. If that changes, part of this article changes with it — check the listing yourself.

Welltory's own connections. Its help centre lists direct integrations with AccuWeather, Fitbit, Garmin, Netatmo, Oura, RescueTime, Slack, Strava, Swarm and Withings, and says of Apple Health that "we receive all data types we're able to process." Migraine Buddy is not among them.

And the thing this article exists to say plainly: Welltory has no migraine diary and no attack log. No pain-location picker, no attack timer, no medication field, no symptom checklist, no report for a clinician, no doctor portal, no reminder to log. It is not a migraine tracker app and not a replacement for one. What it holds is the other record, and that is the whole of the proposition here.

So: Migraine Buddy holds the attack. A nervous-system tracker holds the week. You hold the calendar that joins them.

What should you log where, and how do you run both without it becoming a job?

The failure mode of two logs is obvious: you keep one. So split them by a rule you can apply without thinking. Anything you have to think about goes in Migraine Buddy; anything a sensor can collect goes in the other app.

1. Keep logging attacks exactly as you do now. Do not change your diary habits to accommodate a second app.

2. Make the physiological record passive wherever you can. With an Apple Watch or Oura ring on an iPhone, sleep, resting heart rate, stress stretches, recovery and Battery accumulate without you doing anything. Without a device, a one-minute morning reading with the phone camera — fingertip over the camera and flash, sitting or lying still — gives one consistent daily point, as long as you take it the same way at the same time. A camera reading is a snapshot, not continuous monitoring and not an ECG; see how accurate HRV from a phone camera is.

3. Tag the attack in the second app too — one word. The only duplication worth doing. Type "migraine" when the app asks "What happened?", or add a note. Two seconds, and it is what makes the two records findable against each other later. The full account stays in Migraine Buddy.

4. Give it three months before you look for anything. Peris and colleagues used 90-day diaries. Episodic migraine means roughly one to four attacks a month, so three months is three to twelve attacks — thin, but the smallest window with any chance of showing a repeated shape. Look after two weeks and you will see noise and believe it. And if checking two apps becomes part of the load, stop one for a month; there is no prize for completeness.

How do you read one week across two records?

Here is the method. The example sentences below are made up to show the shape of the reasoning — they are not data from anyone, and nothing here is a finding or a prediction.

Start from the attack, not the physiology. Open Migraine Buddy and write down the date and start time of one attack. Say it is Thursday afternoon.

Mark out the window — Thursday afternoon back to Tuesday afternoon, 48 hours. Mark Monday too, because of the two-consecutive-days finding.

Read all four days in one go, not day by day and not as a verdict on each one. You are looking for whether the window differs from your own ordinary weeks: a run of short or broken nights, resting heart rate above your usual for several days, a cluster of stress stretches, a Battery that did not recharge across two nights.

Write one sentence, of the right kind. "Tuesday and Wednesday nights were both short, resting heart rate was up about four beats across both days, and the attack came Thursday afternoon." That is an observation. The sentence to avoid is "two short nights gave me a migraine" — with one attack you cannot distinguish that from coincidence, and Houle and Turner's work is a direct warning about this inference.

Repeat after the next attack, and the one after. Only repetition across several attacks turns an observation into a pattern, and even then it is an association to raise with a clinician.

A clean window is also a result. If the days before your attacks look indistinguishable from your ordinary weeks after three months, your attacks are probably not tracking what this tracker measures, and you can stop looking there.

The most common mistake is reading backwards from a low number: HRV was low on Wednesday, Thursday was an attack day, so Wednesday acquires meaning. Low mornings happen constantly — short nights, alcohol, an infection, a heavy week, ordinary variation. The check is to look at your low mornings that were not followed by an attack; if there are many, Wednesday was telling you nothing. Our guide to migraine triggers covers why this reasoning fails so reliably.

What should you take to the neurologist from each record?

From Migraine Buddy: the clinical facts. Migraine days in the last month and the last three months, attack duration, typical severity, aura if you get it, accompanying symptoms, and how many days you used acute medication. The Migraine Impact Report exists for this conversation; export it before the appointment rather than scrolling the app in the room. For what a good entry contains, see our headache diary guide.

From the nervous-system record: context, labelled as context. A few weeks of resting heart rate and HRV next to your sleep, with attack dates marked; Welltory exports CSV from the web app (Dashboard → choose a chart → Export). This answers a question clinicians often ask and patients often cannot: how the last two months actually went — sleeping, recovering, loaded or not — rather than how they are remembered.

Say which is which out loud. "Here is my attack diary, which has the migraine days, and here is my sleep and resting heart rate for the same period, which is context." A clinician can use both; what they cannot use is a dashboard presented as evidence of a trigger. Migraine days per month is what preventive treatment decisions are built on — the American Headache Society's 2021 consensus statement sets out how new acute and preventive options fit into practice, and the frequency count is the input, not an HRV trend.

Where does this pairing not help?

When the diary alone is enough. If your attacks have an obvious repeating pattern — tied to your cycle, to a medication, to a known and avoidable exposure — you do not need a second record to find it. ICHD-3 defines menstrual migraine as attacks on day 1 of bleeding plus or minus two days in at least two of three cycles, and establishing that takes a diary and three months, not a wearable.

When neither tool answers the question. Is an attack coming? No. The best published forecasting work using daily stress diaries, by Houle and colleagues, reached an AUC of 0.73 in training and 0.65 on leave-one-out validation across 95 people and 4,626 days, with good calibration but low resolution. A 2026 machine-learning study by Faisal and colleagues — 146 people, 21,550 headache days, wearables recording muscle tension, HRV and skin temperature — reached a best time-series test AUC of 0.84 for the next calendar day, while standard machine-learning and foundation-model approaches on the same data reached only 0.59 and 0.55; the authors state the models need independent validation before clinical use. Full detail in can a smartwatch predict a migraine? Was that a migraine or a tension headache? Neither record can say; that is a symptom-based diagnosis. Will this treatment work? A clinical question, not a tracking one.

When tracking becomes the problem. A routine that invites you to scan for warning signs can raise anxiety without producing information. If you recognise that, run the physiological half passively and look only after an attack — or drop it. The diary is the part that matters clinically.

Red flags that need a doctor, not more tracking. Call 911 or go to an emergency department for a sudden, explosive headache ("the worst headache of my life"); a headache with new weakness, numbness, confusion, trouble speaking or vision loss; a headache with fever and a stiff neck; or a headache after a head injury. See a doctor promptly for a headache pattern that is new or has changed — especially a new headache after 50 — one steadily worsening, one that changes with posture, or one set off by coughing, sneezing or straining. These come from the SNNOOP10 red-flag list published in Neurology, which uses onset after 65 as its formal age cutoff.

Living with migraine and two logs: the questions people ask next

Is the Migraine Buddy app free?

Yes, with a paid tier. Checked on 6 October 2026: Migraine Buddy is free to download on both the App Store and Google Play, and lists in-app purchases — a Monthly Plan, an Annual Plan and a Two-Month Subscription. The paid tier, MBplus, adds weather forecasting, advanced tracking and reporting, coaching programmes and — on iOS — smart suggestions and an attack-duration estimate. The core attack diary and the reports for your doctor are the parts most people use, and the app is usable without subscribing. We do not list prices; check the store listing.

I use an Oura ring with Migraine Buddy. Does that already give me the layer underneath?

Partly, and less than the headlines suggest. As of 6 October 2026 the App Store listing describes the Oura sync as menstrual cycle plus sleep data going into Migraine Buddy. The January 2026 announcement from Aptar Digital Health and Oura described a broader set — "sleep, heart rate variability, temperature trends, cycle insights, and more" — but gave no launch date and no markets or tiers, and we could not confirm HRV is available in the app today. If you want HRV and resting heart rate next to your attacks, check the current listing first; if it is not there yet, that is the gap a second app fills. Your Oura data can also go to a nervous-system tracker directly, which is a separate path.

How long do I have to do this before it tells me anything?

Three months is the realistic minimum, and longer is better. Peris and colleagues built individual factor-attack profiles from 90-day diaries in 326 people — a profile for 87% of them, averaging four factors each, unique in 85% of those with any association. With episodic migraine that window contains perhaps three to twelve attacks, and anything you see at two weeks is noise. Even at three months, what you have is a repeated observation for your neurologist, not a proven trigger.

How to bring this up with your doctor

Lead with the count, from the diary. "I had seven migraine days last month and about five a month since spring, most with nausea and light sensitivity." Frequency, main features and change over time are what a clinician needs first, and that sentence comes out of Migraine Buddy, not a heart-rate chart. Bring the medication-day count with it: frequent use of acute headache medicines can itself make headaches more frequent, which ICHD-3 calls medication-overuse headache, and it is easy to underestimate from memory.

Offer the physiology as background, in one sentence. "I also have about two months of sleep and resting heart-rate data if that is useful." Let the clinician decide; a dashboard handed over uninvited uses up the time you needed for the diary.

Describe early symptoms separately. Yawning, fatigue, neck pain, food cravings or light sensitivity in the hours before pain are clinical information in their own right — in the PRODROME screening data, neck pain appeared in 41.9% of logged prodrome events and fatigue in 50.1%.

Do not present an association as a trigger. "My attacks tended to follow weeks with several short nights" invites a useful conversation. "My HRV predicts my migraines" does not, and the evidence does not support it.

Ask these directly. Is this episodic or chronic migraine? Given my number of migraine days, would preventive treatment make sense? Am I at risk of medication-overuse headache? Is there anything in my pattern that needs investigating rather than managing? If you feel dismissed, ask what would change their assessment and whether a referral to a headache specialist is possible.

How Welltory helps — and what it cannot do

The limits first, because they decide everything else.

Welltory is a general wellness product, not a medical device. It does not diagnose, predict, monitor, prevent, treat or mitigate migraine or any other condition. It has no migraine diary and no attack log, no symptom tracker, no medication field, no reminders, no PDF report for a clinician and no doctor portal. It is not a migraine tracker app, it does not replace one, and if you came looking for a better attack diary than Migraine Buddy, this is not it. What it can hold is the physiological layer for the same days your diary covers.

Take a morning reading the same way each day, or let a device do it. A one-minute reading with the phone camera (fingertip over the camera and flash, sitting or lying still) gives resting heart rate and HRV; the Heartbeat Report view is built for morning readings taken under the same conditions. On an iPhone with an Apple Watch or Oura ring, sleep analysis, stress minutes, stress stretches, recovery and Battery accumulate passively. A camera reading is a snapshot, not continuous monitoring, and not an ECG.

Tag the attack with one word. When the app flags a stress stretch and asks "What happened?", tap a suggested tag, type a few words, or talk: "migraine", "aura", "short night", "period day 1". Notes added with the plus icon go to your Journal (Premium). The detail belongs in your diary app — this tag exists only so the two records can be found against each other.

Look at the window, not the day. After an attack, read the previous 48 hours as a block — sleep, resting heart rate, stress stretches, Battery — against your own ordinary weeks. When the screen and your body disagree, believe your body.

Give My Patterns a few weeks. Once a tag has appeared at least 7 times in the current month, with some history from the month before, My Patterns shows which tagged situations tend to come before stressful stretches, which tags are rare but hit hard, day-of-week trends, and every time a tag appeared. Its tags come only from stress and rest stretches, which need heart-rate data through the day — so it needs an iPhone with an Apple Watch or Oura ring, and standalone notes do not feed it.

Export for the appointment. CSV from the web app (Dashboard → choose a chart → Export), alongside your Migraine Impact Report. Two documents, two jobs.

Whatever shows up: patterns here are associations to discuss with your doctor — not proof of a trigger, and not a warning system.

How we made it

Made with AI tools, then edited and fact-checked by the Welltory team. See our Editorial & AI policy.

Data analysis by Jane Smorodnikova, co-founder of Welltory and the person who built the methodology behind how we read physiological data.

Written by Tatsiana Yashyna.

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