What the studies report
The link between air pressure and headaches has been studied more than most people expect. Studies of migraine sufferers in Japan (Kimoto et al., 2011; Okuma et al., 2015) found attacks clustering when pressure had dropped, with sensitivity commonly described somewhere around 5 to 10 hPa below the usual level. A large study of emergency department visits for headache in Boston (Mukamal et al., 2009) found that lower pressure in the preceding days went with a higher short-term risk.
None of this says pressure causes a headache, and none of it predicts yours. It does explain why so many people want to see the number.
The rate matters more than the number
A reading of 1005 hPa means little on its own. Weather systems move the pressure all the time, and altitude moves it further: pressure falls by roughly 1 hPa for every 8 metres of height. What the research and most people’s own experience point at is the change, and how fast it happens. The same 6 hPa over six hours is a different event from 6 hPa spread over three days.
That is exactly what an alert rule in Barometer Reborn measures: an amount, inside a time window.
Setting it up
- Turn on background monitoring. On a phone with a barometer the app then measures every 15 minutes, so a fall at night is still recorded.
- Start from a ready-made rule. Weather change watches for more than 5 hPa within 3 hours. Extreme weather change watches for more than 10 hPa within 3 hours.
- Adjust it to yourself. A custom rule takes any amount and any window: a fall of 4 hPa over 6 hours, a rise, a value going above or below a level, or the pressure staying steady.
- Keep it in view. The home screen widget and the status bar notification show the current value and the trend without opening the app.
Notifications tell you the pressure moved by the amount in your rule. What you do with that is your call; the app gives no advice and makes no health claim.
Your record beats any average
Everyone’s threshold is their own, which is why the history matters more than the alert. The app keeps every reading and charts it over 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days or 30 days, with the minimum, maximum, average and total change for the window. Export the window you are looking at (up to 30 days) as CSV, put it next to your own headache diary, and a few weeks of your data will tell you more than any study population can.
If you travel, add your home as a place. Readings taken elsewhere then stay out of the home chart, and a weekend in the mountains does not look like a storm.
Phones without a barometer
Not every phone has a pressure sensor (here is how to check). Without one, the app fetches the pressure for your location from a weather service. It needs a connection, the update cadence is the provider’s, and alert rules are evaluated on the server and arrive as a push notification. The rules themselves work the same way.
What the app is not
Barometer Reborn is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, prevent or treat anything, and it does not forecast the weather. It records the air pressure and tells you when it changed by the amount you asked about. If headaches are affecting your life, talk to a doctor; your pressure history may be a useful thing to bring along.
