Frequently asked questions

Ness is an AI health coach for iPhone and Apple Watch that turns your Apple Health data into daily Health, Sleep, Recovery, Strain, and Stress scores. It pairs those scores with an AI health chat, AI nutrition tracking, and long-term trend charts so you can understand when to train, recover, or adjust your habits.

Ness is built for anyone with an Apple Watch who wants to understand their health data without spreadsheets or guesswork. You do not need to be an athlete. The daily scores, nutrition logging, and AI coach are designed for general health and wellness, not just training blocks.

Ness runs entirely on Apple Health data from the Apple Watch you already own, so there is no extra hardware or subscription to a wearable platform. Where Whoop and Oura lead with recovery and readiness, Ness also adds per-ingredient nutrition logging by photo, voice, and barcode, plus an AI coach that can tie what you ate to how you slept and recovered. Unlike Gentler Streak, Ness ships a full AI health chat, not just a readiness score.

Ness is free to download and includes a free trial, so you can try every feature before subscribing. After the trial, an active subscription is required. Monthly and yearly plans are available.

Ness is $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year, billed through the App Store. Prices may vary by region. A free trial is available to eligible users. You can cancel anytime through your Apple ID account settings at least 24 hours before the end of the current billing period.

No. Ness is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, monitor, or prevent any disease or medical condition. It provides general health and wellness information only. Consult a qualified healthcare professional before making decisions based on your data.

Ness calculates five daily scores: Health, Sleep, Recovery, Strain, and Stress. Each is computed on-device from your Apple Health and Apple Watch data, so your data does not leave your phone to produce the scores.

The Health Score is a weighted blend of your Sleep Score (55%) and Recovery Score (45%). Both must be present for the day, so the Health Score does not appear if you did not wear your watch to sleep or if there is not enough recovery data.

The Sleep Score is made of five components: Duration (30 points, optimal 7.5–9 hours), Sleep Stages (30 points, Deep 17–25% and REM 20–30%), Interruptions (20 points, per-hour wake-ups), Efficiency (10 points, time asleep over time in bed), and HR Dip (10 points, optimal 15–25% heart-rate dip during sleep).

The Recovery Score compares your overnight HRV, sleeping heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, and wrist temperature against a rolling 14-night personal baseline. HRV is weighted most heavily (45 points), followed by sleeping heart rate (30 points), respiratory rate (10 points), oxygen saturation (10 points), and wrist temperature (5 points). Your Sleep Score is blended in at 15%.

The Strain Score is derived from time spent in each heart-rate zone, weighted on a logarithmic scale. Higher zones contribute more: zone 5 carries far more weight than zone 1. Steps add a small baseline so non-workout activity still registers. Heart-rate zones are computed from your heart-rate reserve, which is the gap between your max heart rate and resting heart rate.

Stress Level is a passive measure derived from HRV and heart rate during the day, excluding workout and sleep windows. HRV and heart rate are each weighted equally and compared against a 7-day HRV baseline and your sleep heart rate. The result is labeled Low (33 or below), Medium (34–66), or High (67 and above).

Ness generates dedicated AI insights for health, sleep, recovery, strain, and nutrition. Each insight summarizes your recent patterns and suggests practical next steps. You can continue any insight in AI Chat to ask follow-up questions grounded in your own data.

You can ask about your sleep, recovery, stress, strain, workouts, heart rate, heart-rate zones, nutrition, and long-term trends. The chat is grounded in your Ness data, so it answers from your actual numbers rather than generic advice. You can also attach images, such as food photos or nutrition labels, and ask questions about them.

Yes. Ness stores long-term memory across conversations, so the coach can recall preferences and context from prior chats. You can disable memory per conversation if you prefer a fresh start. Memory is stored in your encrypted Ness account, not on your device.

Yes. The chat can dynamically search the web for up-to-date information when you ask about something outside your own health data, such as general nutrition science or a specific food product. Web search has a weekly usage limit.

Fast mode uses a lightweight model for quick responses with low latency. Pro mode uses a larger model for more detailed reasoning. You can switch between them depending on whether you want speed or depth.

Yes. You can set a custom prompt (up to 2000 characters) that shapes how the coach responds, such as telling it to focus on training, to be concise, or to avoid certain topics. Custom prompts apply across your conversations.

Yes. The chat supports voice dictation so you can ask questions without typing. Voice input uses on-device speech recognition.

You can log a meal four ways: take a photo, describe it with your voice, scan a barcode, or search the food database by text. Ness estimates calories, macros, and micronutrients from whichever method you use, and you can adjust serving size and number of servings before saving.

Yes. Ness estimates approximately 40 micronutrient fields, including vitamins A through B12, sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc, iodine, selenium, copper, and manganese. It also estimates 11 amino acids. When a food entry is missing amino acid data, Ness estimates them from the protein content.

Yes. For compound dishes, Ness decomposes the meal into individual ingredients and stores a per-ingredient breakdown of calories, protein, carbs, and fat. You can review the breakdown before saving the entry.

Ness searches a large food database covering both branded products and generic foods, including barcode lookups. This gives you coverage of packaged items, restaurant meals, and raw ingredients.

Yes, two-way. Ness writes your logged meals (calories, macros, and micronutrients) to Apple Health so other apps can read them, and it imports nutrition logged in other HealthKit apps back into Ness. This means you can log food in Ness and see it in Apple Health, or log food in another app and see it in Ness.

Yes, on iOS 18 and later. Lock Screen and Control Center controls let you start a photo log, barcode scan, or voice log without opening the app. On iOS 16.4 and 17, open the app to log food.

Yes. The Nutrition tab has a dedicated hydration card with an animated glass that fills as you log water. Tap a quick-log preset (8 oz, 12 oz, or 16 oz), or enter a custom amount. Ness tracks your daily total against a 64 oz goal and your seven-day average. The AI coach can see your hydration data too, so you can ask how your water intake relates to your sleep or recovery.

The Fitness tab shows workout minutes, step count, active calories, heart-rate zones aggregated over the week, resting heart rate, max heart rate, heart-rate reserve, and heart-rate recovery. You can also review individual workouts with activity type and duration.

Target Strain is a personalized daily strain band — a lower and upper bound — that tells you how much activity your body is ready for. It rises when your recent recovery is strong and drops when you have done a hard effort in the last few days or when your chronic load over the week is high. Recovery alone provides the harder-day-when-fresh signal; recent strain is never rewarded, only penalized. The target requires at least one day of recovery data and uses your last seven days of strain and recovery.

Heart-rate zones are computed from your heart-rate reserve, which is the difference between your max heart rate and resting heart rate. Ness assigns time in five zones, from zone 1 (very light) to zone 5 (max effort). Each zone contributes to your Strain Score on a logarithmic scale, with higher zones weighted far more heavily.

Heart-rate recovery is the maximum drop in your heart rate over a two-minute window during exercise. A faster drop generally signals better cardiovascular fitness. Ness shows it as a metric on the Fitness tab.

Ness tracks sleep duration, Deep sleep, REM sleep, Core sleep, awake time, awakenings, sleep efficiency, HR dip (heart-rate dip during sleep), and bedtime consistency. All of these feed into your Sleep Score.

Ness tracks overnight HRV, sleeping heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, and wrist temperature. These are averaged over your sleep window and compared against a rolling 14-night personal baseline to produce your Recovery Score.

Yes. Ness computes an optimal sleep duration, bedtime, wind-down time, and wake-up time from your last seven days of sleep and score history. The recommendation appears once you have enough history — at least one valid night of data, effectively a week of regular use. You can enable sleep notifications for wake-up, wind-down, and bedtime reminders based on your scores and average wake time.

Ness tracks more than 18 health and fitness metrics, including heart rate, HRV, resting heart rate, sleep stages, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, wrist temperature, steps, active calories, workouts, and nutrition. Each metric has an interactive chart.

Metric charts support one-week, one-month, three-month, six-month, and one-year ranges. High-frequency metrics like heart rate, steps, HRV, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, and wrist temperature also offer live one-hour and one-day views.

Yes. Each chart shows values, averages, and trends over the selected range, so you can see whether a metric is climbing, falling, or stable.

Yes. Ness ships a native Apple Watch companion app that shows your latest scores and trends from your wrist. It requires watchOS 10 or later.

Ness provides individual complications for Sleep, Recovery, Stress, and Strain scores, plus a combined Daily Scores complication that shows your sleep, recovery, and strain scores together on a rectangular complication. Individual score complications support circular, corner, and inline families.

Yes. The Ness Home Screen widget shows your latest scores at a glance without opening the app.

Lock Screen and Control Center controls for food logging require iOS 18 or later. On iOS 16.4 and 17, open the app to log food. The main app runs on iOS 16.4 and later.

No. Ness does not sell your personal data or health data, and does not train on your personal data or health data. You remain in control of your Apple Health permissions at all times.

AI features in Ness are processed with a Zero Data Retention policy. This means the AI providers Ness uses do not retain your data after processing your request. Ness sends only anonymized data to these providers, so your health data is not stored on their servers or used to train their models.

All daily scores (Health, Sleep, Recovery, Strain, and Stress) are computed on-device from your Apple Health data. Your health data does not leave your phone to produce the scores. AI features like chat and nutrition estimation do send anonymized data to Ness's AI providers under the Zero Data Retention policy.

Ness reads sleep analysis, heart rate, heart-rate variability (SDNN), resting heart rate, step count, active energy burned, workouts, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, wrist temperature, and nutrition data (calories, macros, and micronutrients). You grant these permissions during onboarding and can change them anytime in Apple Health settings.

Ness writes only nutrition data back to Apple Health: calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, sugar, cholesterol, sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc, and vitamins. This lets other HealthKit apps read the meals you log in Ness. Ness does not write heart rate, workouts, or sleep data back to Apple Health.

Sign in with your email using a magic link, or sign in with Apple. No password is required for email sign-in.

Yes. Ness relies on Apple Watch data through Apple Health to calculate its scores and insights. Without an Apple Watch, there is no heart rate, HRV, sleep, or workout data to analyze. The Apple Watch companion app is included and requires watchOS 10 or later.

Ness is an iPhone app. It is not optimized for iPad and does not support tablet layouts. You can install it on an iPad, but the experience is designed for iPhone.

Partially. Ness reads only Apple Health data directly. It does not integrate with the Garmin, Fitbit, or Oura cloud APIs. Oura, Fitbit/Google Health, and Garmin can sync some data to Apple Health, which Ness can then read. However, Ness does not support direct integration with those platforms as of now. Cloud integration is on the roadmap.

Ness requires iOS 16.4 or later. Lock Screen and Control Center food-logging controls require iOS 18 or later. The Apple Watch app requires watchOS 10 or later.

Manage or cancel your subscription through your Apple ID account settings. Subscriptions renew automatically unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current billing period. You keep access until the end of the period you paid for.

Join the Ness Discord community at discord.gg/uk6NrrCkZN for questions, feedback, and feature requests. You can also use the in-app feedback option in settings. Ness does not currently offer email support.

Body Battery, Fitness Age, and bloodwork analysis are on the roadmap. These are not yet available. Circadian rhythm, daylight tracking, environmental sound, and a badge system are not currently planned.