How QiLife works

1. What we ask, and why

Every question is about something you can notice about yourself — how you sleep, how warm you feel, how your digestion behaves, how your mood moves through a week. Nothing asks for your medical history, and nothing requires an account or an email address.

Six assessments, six different angles:

• Nine Constitution — how strongly each of the nine classical constitution patterns shows up in you.
• Yin-Yang Balance — where you sit on two directions at once: warming versus cooling, and moistening versus drying.
• Organ Check — which functional organ systems are asking for attention.
• Symptom Decoder — you pick what you are actually feeling, and it looks for the pattern that best explains that combination.
• Body Clock — how well your daily routine lines up with the times of day the body is traditionally said to work at different jobs.
• Seasonal Alignment — how well your habits fit the current solar term.

2. From your answers to a result

Each statement points at one or two patterns, and some statements point more strongly than others. As you answer, those pointers accumulate, and the assessment weighs them at the end.

What comes back is not a single "type" stamped on you. It is a reading of which patterns your answers point at most clearly, what you said that does not fit them, and — where it matters — what you should be careful about. Every result also tells you how much weight to give it, rather than presenting itself as a settled fact.

3. Why the result sometimes says "nothing stands out"

A common shortcut is to take the strongest signal and name it even when it is barely there. That is how you end up being told you have "Qi deficiency" on the strength of one tired week.

We do not do that. A pattern has to be reasonably consistent across several of your answers before we will name it as present. Below that it is reported as a tendency. And if nothing clears that bar, the result says so plainly — "nothing stands out" is a real answer here, not a failure.

So how much agreement is enough? A pattern is named as present only when the answers pointing at it clearly outnumber the ones pointing elsewhere, and when they agree with each other instead of cancelling out. One emphatic answer never carries a pattern on its own, however strongly you meant it — that is what keeps a bad week from turning into a label. Just under the line, the same pattern comes back as a tendency: visible, but hedged. The bars are set high on purpose, and we would rather hand you a shorter answer than an exaggerated one.

How confident a result is depends on how thoroughly each pattern was covered by the questions you actually answered, whether some of your answers disagreed with each other, and how long you took over them. You always see the reason behind the confidence level, rather than a bare label.

4. Play modes change how it feels, not what it means

Classic, quick, story, swipe, this-or-that, daily and timed modes change how questions are presented, sampled and ordered. The scoring is identical in all of them — which is what makes two runs of the same assessment comparable over time.

Two things are worth knowing. The quick screen covers every pattern but with fewer questions each, so its result is deliberately labelled a tendency rather than a finding. And the 60-second rush's timer affects nothing except a playful label; if you answer implausibly fast we lower the confidence instead, because that is not enough time to have read the question.

5. What the assessments are informed by

The nine-constitution assessment follows the widely used nine-pattern framework associated with Wang Qi and the general structure of the Constitution in Chinese Medicine Questionnaire (CCMQ). The symptom decoder follows the classical pattern model. The body clock and seasonal assessments follow traditional solar-term guidance.

QiLife is not the CCMQ, and it is not a validated clinical instrument. It is an independent implementation with its own questions and its own lines in the sand, built for self-knowledge rather than for clinical use. Where a government or professional standard exists for a given instrument, we do not claim to be it.

6. What a result is not

• It is not a diagnosis, in either TCM or modern medical terms.
• It cannot detect disease. No result here is a substitute for a blood test, imaging, or an examination.
• It cannot account for your medication, your medical history, or your clinician's judgement.
• It measures what you notice about yourself, which varies with mood, culture and attention.
• It is written for a general adult audience — not for children, pregnancy, or people managing serious illness.

If you have persistent, severe or worsening symptoms — chest pain, unexplained weight loss, blood where it should not be, sudden severe pain — skip the quizzes and see a physician.

7. When we change the questions

We revise the assessments from time to time: an unclear question gets rewritten, a misleading one gets dropped. A result saved before one of those changes is not directly comparable with one saved after it, and we would rather say so than quietly move the goalposts. Your saved results keep the date they were produced on.

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