Keep a Separate Allergen Profile for Everyone at Home | AllergyLens

The short answer

Yes, and the profile — not the account — is what a scan is checked against. AllergyLens keeps up to five profiles per account: yourself plus four family members, each with its own allergen list, its own severity for every allergen, and its own EpiPen location, emergency contact and hospital. You switch the active person from the Me tab, every scan is answered from that person's list, and every history item remembers who it was captured against.

Three limits are worth knowing before you set anything up: five is the ceiling, only one profile is active at a scan, and a profile is exactly as useful as the severities you assign to it. If you want to skip the setup reading, AllergyLens is on the App Store; the rest of this page is about whether per-person profiles are the model you actually want.

Why one household is never one allergy

The real problem behind "can I give everyone their own list" is that a shared list is not a conservative default. It is wrong in both directions at once.

Say your household list reads peanut, tree nut, shellfish because one child is anaphylactic to peanut. Your partner has a shellfish intolerance, and your other child tolerates tree nuts in baked goods. A single list treats those three as one undifferentiated threat — so the scan is alarming about a dish that is genuinely fine for two of the three people, and once you have learned to discount it, it is also the scan you discount on the day it matters.

No reordering fixes this: the correct ranking depends on who is at the table, so the unit that has to be stored is the person, not the food.

The second thing behind the question is who may see that list. A household allergy profile is medical information about named people, including children — the kind of data most apps are vague about, covered below with the part that leaves the device stated plainly.

What a profile actually holds

Each profile carries four kinds of information, and they are the reason a profile is more than a name:

• Its own allergen list. Ten allergens are built in — peanut, tree nut, milk, egg, wheat, soy, fish, shellfish, sesame and gluten — plus any custom allergen you add.
• Its own severity per allergen, at three levels: Severe, Moderate, Intolerance. You set it by tapping the severity chip on that allergen.
• Its own emergency details: EpiPen location, emergency contact, and hospital. These are per profile, not a single global setting, because which pen belongs to whom is part of who they are.
• Its own custom allergens, each with an emoji of your choosing and a typed name.

Adding allergens takes one short path: Me → tap the profile card → the editor opens → scroll to "Custom allergens" → tap "+", then name it, pick an emoji, and set the severity chip.

The precision that matters here: severity belongs to the (person, allergen) pair. Peanut can be Severe in one profile and Intolerance in another; the same dish ranks differently for a sibling. This is why severity lives inside the profile rather than in a settings screen — there is no such thing as a household's opinion about how serious peanut is.

One active profile at a time — and the moment it goes wrong

The mechanism is simple and worth stating exactly: you switch the active profile from the Me tab, and identification uses that profile's allergen list. One scan answers for one person. There is no simultaneous multi-profile reading of a single plate — if two people need checking on the same dish, that is two scans, each under the right profile.

That simplicity creates one failure mode that no setting fixes, and it is the practical reason this page is worth reading: the phone gets passed around the table. Whoever holds the phone may scan under their neighbour's profile, and the result will be confidently, correctly, uselessly answered against the wrong allergen list.

Two design choices work against that:

• History is attributed. Every item remembers which profile it was captured against, so scans can be reviewed grouped per person. A scan taken under the wrong profile is visible in review as a stray entry in someone's log rather than a silent corruption of it.
• There is no account-wide fallback list. If no profile is selected, there is no generic "probably fine" answer waiting to stand in for the right one.

The practical discipline that follows is short: make the profile switch part of the handoff. Passing the phone is changing whose allergies it is checking.

The five-profile ceiling, and what Pro actually unlocks

The limit is concrete: up to five profiles per account — yourself plus four family members, and the App Store listing places "up to 5 family profiles" under AllergyLens Pro, alongside the PDF allergen reports you can export for an allergist. It is a monthly or yearly subscription that auto-renews until cancelled.

Two details that matter more than they sound:

• Cancellation is the Apple sheet, not an email. iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions → AllergyLens Pro → Cancel, or Me → Manage Subscription, which opens the same sheet.
• Nothing is removed mid-period. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and no Pro feature is removed before then — so your family's profiles, their severities and their emergency contacts do not disappear partway through a month you paid for.

Five is also a setup-time fact, not a runtime surprise, worth checking before you commit: three children plus two parents plus a grandparent does not fit, and neither does a shared caregivers' list for a nursery. The app does not document what happens past the fifth slot, so treat five as hard.

What actually leaves the device

"Your data stays on your phone" is only true in part, and for a family allergy app the distinction is the whole question.

What stays local. Profiles, history and photos live primarily on your device, encrypted by iOS at rest; sign-in tokens sit in the iOS Keychain; no ads, no data selling. Cloud sync is planned, not shipped, so today the local path is also the only sync path.

What can travel. Identification is not purely local. AllergyLens uses on-device vision together with a backend LLM, and when identification needs the cloud model, the app sends the cropped image plus your declared allergen list to the gateway. The image is not stored after the request completes. No account or sync is involved in that path — it is the scan itself.

Why that matters specifically for profiles: the allergen list that leaves the device is the active profile's list. Per-person design has a privacy consequence that a single shared list would not have — what is shared per scan is a named person's medical list, not a neutral photograph.

The hard reset is simple, and for a profile holding children's health data it is the one that matters: delete the account from the Account page to wipe all on-device profiles, history and photos, and sign out.

What AllergyLens does differently

The differentiator is not the detector; it is that the profile is the unit of scanning rather than the account. Four things follow from that one decision:

• Severity is a property of a person and an allergen together — three levels, set on a chip — so the same food ranks differently for a sibling who tolerates it and a parent who does not.
• Emergency data travels with the person: EpiPen location, emergency contact and hospital are per-profile, so the SOS screen surfaces the right ones.
• History is attributed per person, so a year of scans can be reviewed as five logs rather than one list nobody can read.
• Everything above stays on a device you control, with iOS encryption at rest and an account delete that actually wipes it.

The honest limits are the ones in the previous sections, and they are not small: five profiles, one active at a time, severity set by hand, and no safe-or-unsafe verdict anywhere. AllergyLens never calls a dish safe — it returns detected, suspected, not detected or uncertain, which is a narrower promise than most apps make and the only kind that survives a trace amount in a shared fryer. How the four levels work and what the per-profile SOS actually shows are both worth five minutes before you hand the phone to your kid.

What you can decide now

If your household is genuinely one allergy, a single profile is enough and this page is about more than you need. If it is two or more people with different triggers, different severities, or different pens, the profile model is the part of AllergyLens that does the work, and setting it up per person — allergens, three-level severity, EpiPen location, emergency contact, hospital — takes one short editing pass per person.

Before you start, settle three things: how many people you are actually counting (five is the cap), who owns the phone the family scans on (each device holds its own profiles), and whether anyone needs the PDF report for an allergist, since that is the other half of what Pro unlocks. If those three are comfortable, AllergyLens is a defensible way to run a household allergy list without pretending the house has one allergy — and it is honest about the cases where the answer is "ask the kitchen", which is the only answer that matters anyway.