I’m here to announce a new app a few of my colleagues and I are making to help fight chronic illness. It’s called Flaredown. Where people use the app to track their treatments and triggers along with the severity of their specific illness, we reveal analytics on their information, let the users export their data to take to their doctor, and show users how their treatments and triggers are correlated with their illness severity.
We just launched the campain to crowdfund the project here. Any help is appreciated. Any power users who donate and sign up to be in the first wave of users is more appreciated. The more people we have consistently tracking their treatments, triggers, and illness severity, the more we’ll be able to learn about your specific chronic illness.
We’re making modern science our starting point for that data we collect. If current researchers are using a specific activity index to run a study on an illness, then that’s the index we want to build into the app for our users. For example, we’ll certainly be launching with support for crohn’s disease. Currently, there are two activty indices used ubiquitously in the field (CDAI and Rapid3) for crohn’s, so we’ll be integrating at least one of those surveys into the app as the way users log crohn’s disease severity. Similar indices exist for most of the other illnesses we’ve looked into.
Of course, there are limits to this. Each index takes research and development time, so we’re limiting the number of diseases we explicity support for the first launch to crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and the ‘fund a condition’ backers. In the cases an established index doesn’t already exist, we’ll be working with the patient and their doctor to make a stand-in. On top of both of those, there are still cases where indices exist but require a license that may be (at least, at the moment) out of our price range. Solutions in this case include making a stand-in or to temporarily use our generic activity index.
Current reserachers already put in the leg work to make indices (basically, surveys) that are short enough for patients to consistently fill out, but complex enough to capture at least some notion of severity. By using that same survey you’d be asked to use in a study, Flaredown becomes itself a study. As a data guy, the idea of using big data tools on scientific data is really exciting.