Sign in Subscribe
health

The Ten-Second Asthma Log (iOS Shortcut)

It is the morning after a rough night. You gave the reliever at some point, and again later, and your kid coughed for an hour before settling. Now you are at the visit, the doctor asks how the week went, and the truth is you have no idea, because the data you most needed was being generated in the exact moments you had no hands free to write anything down. The journal is a great idea that dies on the friction of opening a notebook at 2am.

This piece fixes that with the thing already in your pocket. The trick is to split the job cleanly: keep the plan on paper, and put only the logging on the phone. Everything below is built around one number, because a log only helps if it is so fast you actually do it. Ten seconds, one-handed, in the lull after things settle, or it will not survive the month.

The plan stays paper, the log goes digital

It is tempting to put everything in an app, but the evidence says be careful about which half. When a digital action plan was tested against the paper one, it did not reduce unscheduled medical contacts, and families reached for the paper version more than the app when it actually mattered. In the red-zone moment, people grab the page on the fridge, not a buried screen. So the action plan stays paper (see Asthma Toolkit - Action Plan Template).

Logging is the opposite problem. It does not happen in one big moment, it happens in a dozen scattered ones across the month, a puff here, a bad night there, a wheeze at the park. That is exactly the kind of capture a phone is good at and a notebook is bad at. So digitize the part that benefits from being one tap away, and leave the part that benefits from being on the door alone.

The principle: capture now, organize later

Do not try to keep a tidy journal in real time. You will not. Instead, dump everything into one running note as it happens, unsorted, timestamped, and organize it once a week when you have a calm minute. The phone captures, the weekly review organizes. That separation is the whole reason it works.

The weekly handoff

Once a week, during the five-minute weekly review, the week's lines become the picture. Read down the note and transcribe into the journal page: tally the reliever days, note the night wakings, the peak-flow trend, the repeating triggers. Update the running counts, then clear the note (or start a fresh one) for the next week. That weekly transcription is also when the patterns jump out, and it feeds straight into the pre-visit summary when an appointment is coming. All three live in one place, the Visit Kit.

Keep the action plan on paper, where you will grab it. Keep the log one tap away, where you will actually tap it. Let the weekly review turn the pile of timestamps into the picture a clinician can act on.

And be clear about what this is. It is a convenience layer for tracking, not a medical device. It never replaces the action plan, or the decision to call for help.

Get it ready-made

The finished Log Asthma shortcut, built from the exact steps below and tested on a real phone, is yours in one tap. One free email unlocks it, plus the rest of the Asthma Toolkit. No building required.

Get it free
One email, then it is a one-tap add

Prefer to understand it, or bend it to your own kid? The full build is below, about ten minutes, once. Nothing here is held back either way.

Build the Shortcut (about ten minutes, once)

First, the shape, because it is the whole design

Picture the actual moment. Your kid wakes at 2am. You do not reach for your phone. You go in, you look, you listen, you notice he is working harder to breathe than he should be. You give the reliever. You sit with him. Maybe you set up the nebulizer. He settles. Twenty minutes later, in the quiet, you finally pick up the phone.

That is the moment this has to fit, and notice what you are holding when you get there. You are not holding a category. You are holding a sentence: woke up coughing, sounded tight, gave two puffs and the neb, took about twenty minutes to settle. One event, several things done, one story.

So the Shortcut is built in that order. It asks the open question first, while you still have the sentence in your head. Then it shows you one screen where you tap everything you did, as many as apply. Then it writes one line. Two interactions for the whole event, and you never open it twice.

The build to avoid is the one that feels tidier: a menu at the front that makes you pick one of reliever, nebulizer, peak flow, night waking. That shape fails twice over. It makes you translate your sentence into a category before you have said anything, and then, having given a puff and run the neb and checked a peak flow, it makes you run the whole thing three more times to say so. One night, one event, four trips to the phone. You will do that twice and then stop logging.

Build it

Do this first, it takes five seconds. Open Apple Notes and make one empty note called Asthma Log. That is the note every entry lands in, and making it now means it is already there in the picker when you need it.

Now, on an iPhone or iPad, open the Shortcuts app and tap + to make a new shortcut. Name it Log Asthma.

Step 1, the stuff the phone already knows. Never ask a person for a fact the device is holding. Add these at the top:

  • Current Date → Format Date (Date Format: Custom, format string yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm) → Set Variable named time. That writes the stamp as 2026-07-16 02:14, which sorts in plain order and lets you tell at a glance exactly when each entry happened, and read weeks and months off the note without doing date arithmetic. (Short/Short would show 7/16/26, 2:14 AM, which reads fine to a person but is harder for a tool to parse by date.)
  • Get Current Weather (at Current Location) → Set Variable named weather.
  • Get Details of Weather Conditions, detail Air Quality Index, from weather → Set Variable named aqi.
  • Get Details of Weather Conditions again, detail Air Quality Category, from weather → Set Variable named aqiCat. (That is the "Good / Moderate / Unhealthy" word that rides next to the number.)

Everything up here runs silently and asks you nothing. Set it above the rest and every action below can reach it, which is the one structural habit worth keeping in Shortcuts.

Step 2, the open question. Add Ask for Input, Input Type Text, question "What did you notice? (sound, what they were doing, what's new today)" → Set Variable named context.

This is the most valuable field in the log and it goes first on purpose. The parenthetical is not there to make you fill three blanks, it is there to jog the parts that turn out to matter later: what the breathing sounded like in plain words, what your kid was doing when it started, and anything different about today. Those are the exact things the rest of this toolkit teaches you to watch for, and the question is where they get captured. Tap the mic and say the sentence you already have. If you have nothing to say, tap Done on an empty field and the Shortcut carries on without it.

Step 3, one screen, tap everything you did. Add a List action with these items, one per line:

Reliever 1 puff
Reliever 2 puffs
Nebulizer given
Peak flow
Controller dose given
Woke at night

Then add Choose from List, and this is the setting the whole design hangs on: turn Select Multiple on. Set the prompt to "What did you do?". → Set Variable named did.

Select Multiple is the difference between a menu and a checklist. With it on, you tap reliever, nebulizer, and peak flow, hit Done, and all three come back. With it off, or with a Choose from Menu action in its place, you get exactly one and the rest of the night goes unrecorded.

Then add Combine Text, combining did with a Custom separator of , → Set Variable named didText. That turns your taps into Reliever 2 puffs, Nebulizer given, Peak flow. (The word "given" is on the two plain nouns, Nebulizer and Controller dose, only to make clear they were administered. The puff items already say it, and Peak flow and Woke at night are not things you "give.")

Two small things about that list, both of which matter more than they look. The reliever items say Reliever 2 puffs with no comma in them, because the comma is doing a job as the separator between items. Put commas inside the items too and the finished line stops being able to tell you where one thing ends and the next begins. And notice each dose is its own item rather than a reliever item that then asks how many. Flatten sub-questions into the list wherever you can. One tap beats two, and there is no branch to maintain.

Step 4, the one follow-up worth asking. Peak flow is the only item that carries a number, so it is the only one that gets a question, and only when you actually tapped it.

Add If, condition: didText contains Peak flow. Inside it: Ask for Input, Input Type Number, question "Peak flow reading?". Then add Replace Text: in didText, find Peak flow and replace it with Peak flow (with a trailing space) followed by the Provided Input variable → Set Variable named didText, overwriting it. Then End If.

That tucks the number right onto the words it belongs to, so it reads Peak flow 240 no matter where peak flow fell in your taps. If you never tapped peak flow, nothing changes and it stays out of the line entirely. (An earlier version parked the number at the end of the list, which is how you get the reading stranded on the wrong item, like Controller dose 240.)

Step 5, write the line. Add a Text action:

[time] · [context] · [didText] · AQI [aqi] ([aqiCat])

Then Append to Note, pointed at your Asthma Log. Then Show Notification → "Logged ✓".

The bracketed things are variables, not typing. Tap the variable bar above the keyboard to insert them, do not type the words.

What comes out the other end:

2026-07-16 02:14 · woke up coughing, sounded tight, settled in about 20 min · Reliever 2 puffs, Nebulizer given, Peak flow 240 · AQI 78 (Moderate)

One line. One trip to the phone. The whole event, in the order you actually lived it.

Two notes on the list itself. Woke at night is in there, but most of the time you will not need it, because a line stamped 02:14 has already said so more reliably than a tired person tapping a button. Tap it when you are logging in the morning about last night. And the puff options are there to record what happened, not to suggest what to give. What to give lives on your action plan.

Why the open question comes first

The question is first because it is the thing you lose fastest, and the most valuable thing in the whole log.

A line reading Reliever 2 puffs tells a doctor almost nothing. at the gym · Reliever 2 puffs tells them exercise. swim practice, warm indoor pool · Reliever 2 puffs puts chlorine on the table. third night of this cold · Reliever 2 puffs is a different story entirely. Six weeks of numbers is a tally. Six weeks of context is a pattern, and a pattern is the thing worth carrying into a ten-minute appointment. The number tells anyone reading it that something happened. The context tells them why, which is the only part they can act on.

There is a real objection to putting it first, and it is worth answering rather than dodging. A keyboard on screen is friction, and friction is what kills logs. If this thing opened with a text field at the exact second your kid needed you, you would put the phone down and log nothing.

But that is not when you open it. Nobody stops to type while their kid is struggling to breathe, and no shortcut should be designed as though they would. You open it after, in the twenty-minute lull once things have calmed down. By then the keyboard costs you nothing, and the sentence is right there, fresh, about to evaporate. Ask an hour later and you get "bad night." Ask now and you get what actually happened.

Two things make answering it nearly free. Dictate it. Tap the mic and talk. That is two seconds, one thumb, no aim required in the dark, and it is the same trick that makes the whole capture-now-organize-later loop work. And skip it without guilt whenever you need to. Tap Done on an empty field and you still get a timestamped line with everything you tapped. An entry with the doses and no context beats no entry, every time.

When you do answer, describe what you noticed, in your own words. You do not need the words a clinician would use, and reaching for them can actually make things worse. When parents are shown video clips of children wheezing, fewer than half identify the wheeze correctly, and up to a third of the wheeze parents report cannot be confirmed by a doctor. That is not a knock on parents. It means "wheeze" is a slippery word to hang a log on, and a log full of the wrong technical term is worse than a log full of plain description.

So write what you would say out loud. "Whistly breathing out," "barky," "tight," "coughing every few minutes for an hour," "fine walking, wheezy after running," "kept up with everyone at the party" are all worth more at the visit than "bad night," and all of them survive translation. You are the only person who was in the room. What you heard and saw is real information, and nobody can reconstruct it later from a puff count.

Log the small stuff, because the pattern lives in the combination. No single early sign predicts a flare well enough to act on alone. But in young children, a cluster of daytime cough plus daytime wheeze plus needing the reliever overnight, showing up together the day before, flagged about two-thirds of exacerbations while crying wolf only about one time in seven. That is the case for logging the boring entry. One cough on a Tuesday means nothing. One cough on a Tuesday, sitting next to two more lines you would have forgotten, is the shape of something starting. The log is not there to catch the emergency. You will not miss that one. It is there to catch the week before it.

About the peak flow item

Keep it in the list, but do not build your week around it, and do not feel behind if you never tap it.

The honest evidence on home peak flow is humbling. Symptom-based action plans do at least as well as peak-flow-based ones for keeping kids out of urgent care, and children prefer them. Peak flow is also brutally effort-dependent, roughly a quarter of children perform every step correctly, and it is unreliable under about five and shaky under about ten. Most tellingly, daily monitoring does not survive contact with real life: adherence runs about 63% at one month, 50% at six, and 33% at a year, and in one study more than a quarter of families were writing numbers into the diary that the meter never recorded. Not out of dishonesty. Because a daily chore you have fallen behind on gets reconstructed from memory on the way to the appointment.

That last finding is the best argument for this whole Shortcut. A number you tap in the moment cannot be back-filled on the drive to the clinic. The timestamp makes the log honest in a way a paper diary structurally cannot be, and an honest sparse log beats a complete invented one every time.

So peak flow earns its place as one item you sometimes tap rather than a daily prompt, which is exactly what the multi-select gives it. It costs nothing sitting there unpressed. It is genuinely valuable in specific situations, when a child does not feel their own obstruction until it is severe, when there is a history of a bad attack, or when a clinician has built it into your plan and wants the trend. In those cases, peak flow plus symptoms together beats either alone. Otherwise, the reliever taps and what you noticed are carrying the weight. Your action plan decides which of those you are.

More than one asthmatic in the house

Asthma runs in families, so this comes up fast. The instinct is to add a "who is this for" menu at the front of the one Shortcut, and it is the wrong instinct. That menu adds a decision to every single capture, and at 2am, holding a spacer, you will eventually tap the wrong name. One mislabeled entry poisons the whole log, because now nobody can trust any of it without an audit.

Duplicate instead. Build the Shortcut once, then copy it per person: open the copy, rename the tile Log Asthma, [name], and point its Append action at that person's own note. About a minute per person. The tap itself carries the answer, and each person's log stays one clean story you can hand to a clinician without anyone else's data riding along. The A Log Per Person pattern walks through the same move in general form.

Why the AQI stamps itself, always

The day's air quality is one of the more useful things you can have sitting next to a bad night, and your phone already knows it. So it is in the build at step 1, not offered as an extra, and it never asks you anything. That is the general rule worth taking with you: if the device holds the fact, the device stamps the fact. You can do the same trick with anything else it already has, like temperature or humidity.

One caveat on availability. Whether the Air Quality Index property returns a number depends on your iOS version and region, because Apple's air-quality data does not cover everywhere. If it comes back empty, drop those two actions and note the number by hand on bad-air days only. And while the same Weather action offers an Air Pollutants property, which sounds perfect for what comes next, skip it. In practice it returns output too messy to be worth the line.

One thing not to build here. It is tempting to ask "were you inside or outside?" and only stamp the AQI for outdoor entries, on the logic that being indoors makes the outdoor number meaningless. Resist it, for three reasons.

The first is that it puts a decision in front of every capture, which is the whole tax this design exists to avoid.

The second is that being indoors helps less than it feels like it should. Across US homes, roughly 60% of outdoor fine-particle pollution makes it inside, and closing the door does not close the gap. On a smoky or high-particulate day, the air in the house is not clean air, it is somewhat-less-bad air, so the number still describes something your child is breathing.

The third is the one that actually settles it. Ozone behaves the opposite way, and mostly dies at the doorstep: only about a quarter of it survives indoors, because it reacts with walls, carpet, and furniture on the way in. So the honest answer to "does the AQI matter indoors" is it depends on what today's number is made of. And here is the catch: the AQI reports whichever single pollutant is worst that day without telling you which one that was. At 2am, holding a spacer, you cannot know whether today's 140 is a particulate number that followed you inside or an ozone number that did not.

You cannot make that call in the moment. You can make it in five minutes on Sunday with the actual data in front of you. So stamp everything and sort it out later. An AQI reading you did not need costs you nothing, four characters at the end of a line your eye skips past. An AQI reading you wanted three weeks ago is simply gone. That is the capture-now-organize-later principle doing its job: when in doubt, grab it, because capture is cheap and hindsight is not.

That is the whole Shortcut. A sentence you dictate, a few things you tap, and a timestamped line lands in the running note with the air quality already on it.

Make it instant (so you'll actually use it)

A log you have to hunt for is a log you skip. Put it one motion away, pick whichever fits your habits:

  • Home Screen icon, in Shortcuts, tap the shortcut's options → Add to Home Screen.
  • Lock Screen widget, add a Shortcuts widget so you can log without unlocking.
  • Back Tap, Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap → Double Tap → choose Log Asthma. Now two taps on the back of the phone opens it.
  • Siri, just say "Hey Siri, Log Asthma."

The most-used button by far will be reliever puffs, so make sure that one is fast.

First run, allow two things. The first time you run it, iOS asks permission for Weather (so it can read the air quality) and Notifications (for the "Logged ✓" confirmation). Two prompts pop up in a row, tap Allow on both, choosing "Allow While Using" for the weather one. It only ever asks once.

References

Sources behind the claims in this piece. Listed here rather than inline so the prose reads cleanly. Each entry is what actually backs the claim it supports, not adjacent literature.

On the action plan staying paper (families reach for paper over an app):

On roughly 60% of outdoor fine particulate pollution reaching indoor air, so the outdoor number still describes indoor exposure:

On ozone being largely destroyed indoors (indoor-to-outdoor ratio around 0.25), which is why the AQI's meaning indoors depends on what the number is made of:

On parents' accuracy identifying wheeze, and why plain description beats the technical term:

On no single early sign predicting a flare, while a cluster of cough, wheeze, and overnight reliever use the day before flags about two-thirds of exacerbations:

On symptom-based action plans matching or beating peak-flow-based plans in children:

On peak flow technique, effort dependence, collapsing adherence over a year, and fabricated diary entries:

On peak flow plus symptoms together outperforming either alone, and on who benefits most from peak flow:

Read next

Comments ()