Tired? Anxious? Moody? Canadian App Maker Says Breathe Deep, Have a Drink …of Water

One could find many reasons to be tired, anxious or moody these days. Personal, professional, political.

But there’s a Canadian app maker offering a healthy response: Take a deep breath. Drink plenty of water.

The App Store award-winning developer Llama Luna, out of Vancouver, has recently updated its Waterllama app with added features to help improve your health, attitude, and well-being – while you have fun making good new habits.

Like staying hydrated.

The popular Waterllama smart water app is used to keep track of your water intake, give you reminders if you’re not hydrating enough, and provide challenges, health tips, and other fun perks along the way to get you drinking.

Sounds simple enough, but staying properly hydrated is key to avoiding many modern maladies.

For example, a person’s usual water intake amount and drinking patterns are known to affect sleep quality and duration; taken together, sufficient sleep and adequate hydration can help improve cognitive function and emotional mood. A significant correlation between our daily water intake and our ability to concentrate has been identified by researchers, and a decrease in daily water intake has been shown to have a negative effect on concentration.

That’s what Vitalii Mogylevets realized about his own situation. The founder of Llama Luna and copyright holder on the app said he felt himself with low energy levels after a poor night’s sleep, often caused by long days and not enough water. “When I started drinking more water, I was fixed! I could feel more energy. A better mood! The only issue was – how do I encourage myself to keep drinking water? How do I know I’ve have enough?”

Using creative challenges, personalized reminders, and lots of colourful animations and characters, he had his answer: an app that makes hydration fun.

Because it is serious business.

Water is an essential nutrient that keeps our body hydrated, our joints lubricated. It helps with digestion and breaking down waste. Water helps circulate oxygen and nutrients throughout our bodies.

These and other health impacts are why the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics ballparks a daily fluid intake of just over three litres (about 100 ounces or 12.5 cups) for men, and about two litres for women (73 ounces/9 cups), but it recommends those figures just as a starting point for calculations, with factors like body size, metabolism, diet, location, physical activity and existing health conditions also being considered. Water, milk, juice, broth and some teas contribute to hydration; coffee or caffeinated drinks can work against you. Daily food and fresh produce can count towards hydration, with 15 to 20 per cent of our fluid needs coming from the food we eat: carrots are more than 80 per cent water; with celery, it’s over 90 per cent!

As mentioned, a significant correlation between daily water intake and concentration has been identified, and not being hydrated can certainly disrupt sleep (yours, and because dehydration can lead to dry mouth, dry nasal passages and then to snoring, perhaps your partner’s, as well).

While the amount of hydration each of us needs can differ, the time usually doesn’t: we need to drink consistently throughout the day. We should not meet our intake needs all in one sitting, especially not before bedtime. But drinking water in the evening can still be beneficial, in reasonable amounts. Best is to balance fluids throughout the day by drinking water with every meal, staying hydrated after exercising, and getting extra water from fruits and vegetables.

Helping with all of these hydration factors is an important function of the Waterllama application: it calculates a person’s hydration needs, based on typical inputs like gender, weight, height, and on on. But the app makes its calculations with other factors in mind, such as activity levels, even typical climate conditions. Other drinks besides water can be logged in the app, and it will automatically calculate the actual water content, so to avoid over- or under-hydration.

Waterllama is compatible with iOS 13 or later, on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and M1 Mac or later. While there’s no Android version on the horizon right now, multiple language versions are available.

Waterllama reps say its calculator is based on widely accepted hydration guidelines, but they always encourage users to adjust their goal based on other factors, such as how they feel and what their doctor recommends.

The Waterllama water tracker is free to download, but a subscription is required to access some perks and added features. Among the free app’s features are water intake tracking, intake goal calculator and calendar, and water cup sizes in ounces and millilitres. The iOS app for iPhone and iPad also syncs with Apple Health and Apple Watch.

There are premium paid features, including lots of colourful characters (the team behind the app created over 500 illustrations seen in the app), new challenges, multiple beverages, reminder sounds, ability to manage personalized beverages panel, edit water intake history, change glass/cup size, and more. Waterllama developers say even more Beverages, Characters, Challenges and Features come in monthly updates (the latest update added switch on/off Add Water buttons in the Reminders section and enhanced the display with a Large Text mode for Hydration Tips).

Waterllama was actually created in Ukraine, but key team members later moved to Canada, where the development firm has been based but growing globally ever since. Llama Luna works with talented creatives from all over the world. UI is done in Canada, coding happens in one place, sound and illustration somewhere else.

Where the staffers are doesn’t matter as much as them sharing the company vision and passion, and that strategy seems to be working well. Since its release, Waterllama has garnered a 4.9 overall user satisfaction rate with over 100,000+ 5-star ratings, Vitalii reports. “I couldn’t be happier to see that fixing my own problem helped motivate so many people worldwide to become healthier as well!” The app was a 2022 Apple App Store Design Award winner in the Delight and Fun category.

And it’s not the only app the company offers. Not the only app to make us feel better, be healthier.

Mindllama is designed to help foster better mental productivity and emotional focus, offering up restorative sleep and breathing techniques as a calming wellness tool. There are a host of helpful suggestions, motivational tips, calming visuals, sounds and more on the app to encourage relaxation, clarity, even meditative activities on the part of the user. Mindllama is available as a monthly or annual subscription.

Pinkllama is woman’s health app for tracking period cycles, fertility windows, and ovulation times. Like other Llama apps, it uses a series of helpful tips and advice, engaging visuals, user tools and more to help track women’s health while, the company reports, taking women’s privacy very seriously.  There’s no sign-up email address required; users remain anonymous. Data remains on the user’s device (or, with user permission, it’s shared with an Apple Watch).

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