Logging during aura shouldn't require you to read anything.

The moment nobody designs for

The visual field fractures at the edge first. A shimmering arc, usually. Then it spreads inward, and by the time the nausea starts, looking at a screen is its own punishment.

That's the moment most migraine apps expect you to open them and log.

Not because the developers are careless. Because the entire design vocabulary of health tracking assumes a user who can see the screen, hold it steady, read small labels, tap small targets, and decide which of six dropdown options best describes what's happening. That assumption works fine when you're filling in yesterday's attack from the couch the next morning. It fails completely when you're in the middle of one right now.

The result is a data gap that distorts everything downstream. You lose the aura start time. You lose the symptom progression. By the time you can look at a screen again, the postdrome has already started and you're logging a reconstruction, a best guess at something that happened hours ago. That reconstruction is less useful to your neurologist, less useful for spotting your own patterns, and less useful for the disability or insurance documentation you may eventually need.

Aura Mode exists because that gap is fixable. Not by making the screen bigger or the font bolder, but by taking the screen almost entirely out of the process.

What Aura Mode actually does (and doesn't do)

Aura Mode is not a different app or a separate mode you have to find in settings during an attack. It's a single gesture, available from Postdrome's home screen, that collapses the interface to four large touch targets and hands primary input off to voice.

The four targets:

Start attack. One tap. Timestamps the aura onset to the second. No form, no confirmation screen.

Voice memo. Hold to record. Speak whatever you can: "vision going, left side, moderate nausea." Postdrome keeps the audio and transcribes it to attach to the attack record. You don't have to be coherent. You don't have to use the right terminology. Say what you're experiencing in whatever words surface; the record is yours.

Pain level. A large horizontal slider, no numbers visible during recording, just position. Left is nothing, right is severe. You can operate it without looking at it.

End attack. Same as start: one tap, timestamps the resolution.

What Aura Mode does not do: it doesn't try to infer symptom type from your voice, it doesn't auto-categorize, it doesn't push a notification asking you to complete the record. It captures the raw signal with the minimum friction possible. You fill in the details, specific triggers, medication timing, postdrome symptoms, when you can see again.

The full attack record, including the aura-phase voice memo and the precise start timestamp, is waiting for you in the timeline.

The voice memo is the underrated part

The slider and the one-tap start get most of the attention. The voice memo is where Aura Mode earns its place for people with complex attacks.

Here's why. The aura phase, and the early headache phase immediately after, is when your most clinically useful information is live and accessible. Specific visual phenomena (fortification spectra, scintillating scotoma, monocular versus binocular), the exact sequence of symptom onset, whether the neck stiffness came before or after the photophobia, what you ate four hours prior, whether you slept badly. Your neurologist wants this detail. Your headache diary needs it. But it's exactly the detail that evaporates by the time the postdrome lifts two days later.

A voice memo captures it in real time. You don't need to organize it. You don't need to speak in full sentences. "Starting now, 10 AM, scotoma right side, moving, moderate. Had coffee this morning, skipped water. Neck tight since last night" is enough. That 15-second recording, attached to a precise timestamp and a pain-level marker, is a better clinical document than anything you'd reconstruct four hours later.

The transcription attaches automatically to the attack record. The audio stays stored locally on your device, not uploaded, not processed externally. If you want to share it with your neurologist, you export the record directly. If you don't, it stays yours.

For people who have complex auras or whose neurologist has asked them to track aura duration specifically, this matters. The difference between a 20-minute aura and a 45-minute aura is not subtle clinically; it's the kind of data that changes a diagnosis conversation.

A real attack, walked through

Not a hypothetical. Here's the sequence for someone who gets visual aura, typically 20-40 minutes before headache onset, and has a neurologist appointment in six weeks.

10:17 AM. Peripheral shimmer starts. Phone is in her pocket. She pulls it out, taps the Aura Mode shortcut from the lock screen (set up in advance, this matters; see below). One tap: attack starts, timestamped 10:17.

10:18 AM. She holds the voice memo button. Eyes mostly closed. Speaks for about 20 seconds: vision going left side, shimmering arc, moderate nausea coming on, had a glass of wine last night, slept six hours, skipped breakfast. Releases. Phone goes face-down on her desk.

10:19 to 11:40 AM. She's in a dark room. Phone stays down. Postdrome Aura Mode doesn't ask her anything. No notifications. No prompts to complete the entry.

11:40 AM. The worst of it is over. She picks up the phone. The attack record is open, timestamped from 10:17. The voice memo is transcribed and attached. She adds the headache phase details, pain level 7, left temporal, nausea peaked around 10:45, took a triptan at 10:20, and taps save.

Six weeks later. She hands her neurologist a PDF export of the last six months of records. The 10:17 AM attack is in there with the aura duration (23 minutes, timed to the start of headache onset she logged at 10:40), the audio memo intact, the wine-and-poor-sleep trigger noted. Her neurologist asks about aura frequency. She has an answer with timestamps.

None of that timeline exists without the 10:17 tap. The triptan timing, the aura duration, the trigger note, all of it depends on capturing the start when it actually started.

Setting up the shortcut before you need it

The only thing Aura Mode can't help with is setup. You have to do that when you can see.

Two things worth configuring in advance:

Lock screen shortcut. iOS lets you put app shortcuts on the lock screen. The exact menu path varies by iOS version, but dig into Settings and look for lock screen or personalization options. Put Aura Mode there. The goal is to get from "aura starting" to "attack logged" in one tap without unlocking the phone, navigating to the app, finding the right button. Every extra step is a step you might not complete.

Voice memo permissions. Postdrome needs microphone access for the voice memo to work. If you haven't granted it, the first time you try to record during an attack is the worst possible moment to hit a system permission dialog. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Microphone > Postdrome and confirm it's on.

Thirty seconds of setup now means the tool is there when your vision goes. That's the whole point.

What this changes for your neurologist relationship

Most neurologist appointments run 20 minutes. If you have a complex attack history, that's not a lot of time to reconstruct six weeks of migraine data from memory.

The way most patients arrive: a rough headache diary (days, rough pain ratings, maybe medication names). Sometimes screenshots from an app. Rarely any aura-phase data, because it was never captured in real time.

The way you can arrive with Aura Mode running: a timeline that shows aura onset times, aura durations, the gap between aura and headache onset, voice memo notes from the attack itself, medication timing relative to onset (not relative to when you remembered to log it), and the full postdrome tail, fatigue, cognitive fog, residual photophobia, tracked through to resolution.

That's a different conversation. Not because the neurologist didn't believe you before, but because pattern recognition requires data. Aura duration trending longer is clinically significant. Aura-to-headache gap shrinking might be. Triggers clustering around a specific sleep pattern are worth flagging. None of those patterns surface from a rough headache count.

Postdrome doesn't interpret your data for you. The timeline is yours to bring into the room and discuss. But it gives you something to bring.

One thing Aura Mode can't do

It can't log what you never told it.

The aura-phase record is only as complete as what you capture in the moment. If you're incapacitated enough that even a one-tap interaction isn't possible, the record starts later. That's real. Some attacks come on too fast, or are severe enough that any phone interaction is off the table.

For those attacks, Postdrome has a retrospective entry mode, you can log an attack after the fact, mark it as historical, and fill in a start time manually. It's less precise than a timestamped live entry, but it's better than nothing, and it's explicitly labeled as retrospective in your timeline so the data quality is clear when you're reviewing it.

Aura Mode is a best-case tool for when you have 30 seconds and one good hand. It's not magic. The goal is to make the 30-second version as complete as possible so the retrospective version is a last resort, not the default.