Trying Vivoo's at-home tests for general health trends
Published on November 11, 2026
Vivoo’s at-home urine tests give you a score out of 10 and flag individual values like sodium and protein, all from a test strip and a phone scan. They are not a replacement for a doctor, but they are a lower-effort way to track trends.
Why I tried a urine test
I’m vegetarian, and a few years ago I found out I have a B12 deficiency. I should keep an eye on it, alongside many other health factors as I get older, but the problem is that I have a bad fear of needles, so regular blood tests are hard for me.
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Try Tower for freeI met the Vivoo team at IFA in Berlin this year (I wrote about the rest of the show too). Their tests let me look at a few metrics without a needle, which is why I wanted to try them.
What’s in the box
I received a pack showing all Vivoo’s tests. Many of them don’t apply to me as they are related to fertility, so I stuck with the general test. Each pack contains a QR code that links to the app, and a single-use sample collector. It’s a stick with coloured patches that react to the sample that the app reads. The app processes the scan and gives you results on eight parameters, so the strip is only half of the product. You can also meal track with the app, which I didn’t test, though I would be interested to do so as I have often found meal tracking apps lacking.
Vivoo sells multi-test kits in Europe, which are available on Amazon.
How to take a test
The app walks you through each step:
- Open the app and start a test.
- Take the sample with the collector. This is one of the harder parts, urinating onto something is surprisingly hard and it’s not completely clear what the “right way” is.
- Wait for the timer in the app. It’s about 90 seconds.
- Scan the strip with your phone.
- Hopefully get the results
Getting a good scan
Lighting matters. My second scan failed because the room was too dark. The app tells you when it can’t read the strip, and then you find yourself running around with a damp strip, trying to find better light and hoping it won’t spoil the results effectiveness.
The tests can also fail, or give you a warning when the app detects the strip was over or under exposed to urine. That is harder to know how to resolve and is related to my earlier point on advice.
My first result
The first test gave me 7.8 out of 10. That sounds low, but it’s nearly 8, so I guess it isn’t bad. The app flagged a couple of values as possible concerns. A lack of magnesium, and overly high protein excretion.
I’d spent the previous day helping someone paint an apartment, and apparently higher than normal physical activity can cause protein to show up in urine. A lack of magnesium is generally diet related, so semi-easy to fix. But this was also just one reading, and one reading doesn’t always represent every day “you”.
My second result
I took the second test weeks later, after a long period of travel, because travel changes your routine too much and I wasn’t sure if it would affect the results. The results shifted slightly,but didn’t improve. The app showed a sample content warning, and I don’t know what that means or what I can do about it, but I again assume it’s related to not collecting a good sample.
This time, my sodium was low, and protein was still high. It’s easy to get overly worried about numbers like these. A strip scanned by an app is not a lab test done by a doctor, so I treat the results as a prompt to ask questions and not as a diagnosis. One of the reasons I took a while to write this post was that I wanted to book a doctor’s appointment to compare the results with a lab test, but I haven’t done that yet.
Should you try Vivoo?
Try Vivoo or products like it if you want to watch general health trends. I wouldn’t recommend (and I assume neither does Vivoo) it to diagnose anything that concerns you or to decide on treatment.
I haven’t yet booked the doctor’s appointment to compare the app’s results with a lab test, and that comparison is the part I most want to see. I plan to update this post once I have it.
Have you tried at-home tests like this? Let me know how they compared with your doctor’s results and what they helped you discover.