Life Forms loads quickly and easily from two 3.5 floppy diskettes. It is a Win3.1 program with full Win95 compatibility. I installed Life Form by 'running' the setup program in Win 95. I'm using an old 486 DX33 upgraded with a Gainberry (Cyrix) 586-133 upgrade chip/voltage set. With this equipment Life Form runs like a top!
When you start the program, you are expected to enter personal information. This info includes height, weight, and your activity level. The entire family can enter their data as users, but don't worry, the data can be password protected if you desire. After entering how active you are, your eating habits, nervous energy, and for females, if you are pregnant or nursing, you are ready to enter and maintain a variety of health data.
The health data includes information, food, exercise, measurements, chemistry, ratings, history, and graphs. The information area stores data about your doctor, insurance company, and pharmacy. The food section is based on a table of 11,000 food items and can show a nutrition breakdown of a specific food item an entire meal. The program maintains a meal history, can develop recipes, and count calories too. The exercise section maintains a record of exercise with a focus on heart rate and categories cover aerobics to weightlifting. The measurement section records all of those personal measurements most of us aren't happy with. The chemistry section tracks the results of blood and urine tests. The rating section lets each user record subjective health factors like stress, happiness, and sex drive. The history section is a journal of your medical history and the graphs section lets you analyze and visually display important fact about your health.
All of the sections offer the standard editing and printing capabilities. An excellent feature set under the file menu allows you to backup and/or restore data from a diskette and also optimize the database files. (Life Form has 18 basic files and can create up to 46 additional files for each user.)
I think program does what you would expect. It tells you all you
want to know about your past and present health condition but takes a special
kind of person to consistently record all of this data. The food and exercise
sections might require daily entries while the chemistry section must wait
for medical evaluations to get the data you need. I'm sure I'm not one
who would sit down at the computer every day and enter my meals, exercises,
and ratings. Are you? If so, and you have the desire or need to track your
health very closely, this program is for you.