Telus Baby Health app

Using your smartphone to keep tabs on baby’s development can be super helpful, especially in those sleepless, confusing first few months. Telus Baby Health offers tracking features, allowing you to record growth (such as weight and height), medical records (immunizations, medications, allergies) and milestones, and it also includes a library of articles and videos. Our Today’s Parent Approved editors and a group of new parents took the Telus Baby Health for a spin, and they found it easy to navigate, simple to use and especially useful for tracking immunizations and medical information. It’s the ideal app for time-crunched parents who prefer utility over bells and whistles.

SET-UP AND NAVIGATION

Getting started with Telus Baby Health is as effortless as answering a few quick questions (nothing too personal) and choosing a PIN for added security—an important feature considering the medical info this app may store. You can track info for more than one baby (triplets, anyone?), and those anxious to get started can even create a profile before baby is born and later change the name. Our parent testers gave this app high marks for its ease of use in terms of set-up.

Navigating the app is intuitive—all the menus are accurately labelled, without too many submenus to complicate matters. Our editors found they were able to do everything they wanted to do with this app on the first try. Inputting data is likewise easy, with the current date automatically filled in for each entry—a really big plus for new parents who often find the days blur together. Personalizing Telus Baby Health with your baby’s name, birth date and photos is quite simple, as is setting reminders and tracking immunizations.

HEALTH RECORDS TRACKING

Where the Telus Baby Health app shines is in its management of health records. Parents can easily keep records of medications, allergies and immunizations—especially helpful if you’re not great at remembering to bring your kid's immunization record to each medical appointment, or your paediatrician asks which fever-relievers you've given your little one and when doses were administered. Our parent testers appreciated that all of their baby's health info could be kept securely in one place, and that it was always handy, whether they were headed to the doctor's office from home or daycare.

The health sections of the app include fields for lots of relevant info—from date and dosage to side effects and notes—but only a small number of them are mandatory, so you can enter as much or as little info as you like (or have time for). Some fields helpfully auto-populate a list of options, including over-the-counter medications, types of allergies and reactions, and immunizations—a really nice feature for exhausted parents. If what you're entering isn't listed, you can simply type in the info. 

While you can see a list of all immunizations, medications given and allergies under each section, you will have to tap through to an individual entry to see all the info you've entered. For example, you won't see any notes you've entered about immunizations in the main list, but notes are visible in the main list for medications and allergies. Interestingly, if you've entered side effects for a medication, you will have to tap through—something that would be very useful to see at a glance in the entries list. And while dates are shown in the list of immunizations, you'll have to click through to individual entries to see dates associated with medications and allergies.

GROWTH AND MILESTONE TRACKING

The Telus Baby Health growth tracker includes weight, height and head circumference. A graph shows your baby's growth in relation to the 97th and third percentiles, giving you a general idea of how your baby's tracking; it doesn't show exactly which percentile your baby falls into. If you want to access the notes you've added to each entry, you'll need to tap through on a specific entry. The majority of our parent testers found it very quick and easy to input growth and milestone information. The app doesn’t offer tracking for the day-to-day things like diapering, feeding and sleeping, which parents felt would add to its usefulness.

The milestones layout is simple and clean, and you can add a pic along with each entry, which makes a lovely reminder of how much your baby has grown. But there's no option to add milestones that aren't already built into the app (you might want to remember baby’s first raspberry!), and the timeline ends at “baby can point to show you something.”

SHARING DATA

Most of our parent testers felt the app gave them better insight into their child’s health and growth, and that the data collected is useful for sharing with a health professional. However, the Telus Baby Health app doesn't have an export function, so you'd need to show your paediatrician your phone or send screenshots. On the plus side, if you want a partner or caregivers to have access to view, edit and save information on your kids' profiles, they can sign into the account from their own device—the email and password will be the same, but they'll set up their own PIN (it's device-specific). 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The Telus Baby Health app also serves up articles and videos personalized to your baby’s age and organized by category, such as “Food and Nutrition” or “Life and Relationships,” and parent testers found the content straightforward and easy to digest. Though our editors found the library of articles and videos was limited, parents said they saw improvement in the range of content over time.

FINAL WORD

“Reliable” is a word many of our parent testers used to describe the Telus Baby Health app, and our editors who tested the app liked how simple it is to navigate and to record data. Most parent testers felt it performed better than other similar apps they’ve used in the past and rated the quality and ease of use as good or very good. While the app doesn’t track day-to-day activities like feeding or sleeping, its growth, immunization and medication features are perfect for doctor’s visits and for noticing patterns in baby’s development—which all of our parent testers cited as reasons they would keep using this app.