Health IT, Startups

Like a meteorologist for your health, Good Days forecasts flare ups in autoimmune conditions

For people with autoimmune disease, the temperature, humidity or barometric pressure on any given day […]

For people with autoimmune disease, the temperature, humidity or barometric pressure on any given day could mean more pain, or less pain, than the day before. Giving those people tools to prepare for what their symptoms might be has so far been a winning idea for mobile health company Predictably Well.

While AccuWeather and Weather.com both have tools that highlight environment factors that might play into migraine and arthritis pain, Predictably Well co-founder Juliet Oberding wanted to create something more personalized, since each person’s disease takes a different course.

Oberding herself was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis back in 2008 and joined up with software developer Terje Norderhaug in 2011 to see if sensors, mobile technology and predictive analytics could help predict flare ups.

The app that resulted, called Good Days, is aimed at people living with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, fibromyalgia and other chronic autoimmune conditions.

Each day, an app user selects from a set of icons to let the app know if she’s feeling good, OK or bad that day. If she wants, she can use the app’s journaling feature to go into more detail about her fatigue or stress levels, or where any pain is occurring.

Then the app goes to work aggregating environmental data from outside sources and geographical data from the user’s device. Using all of that, it tries to determine what factors contribute to a good day and to a bad day, and generates a five-day wellness forecast for that user. Like a weather forecast, it includes an icon that indicates whether each day is expected to be good, OK or bad, but also allows users to drill down into the data that’s behind the forecast.

Last summer, it won the popular grand choice prize at the AT&T San Diego Apps Challenge, a contest that requires developers to use data made available by the city. It’s currently in beta in San Diego, using ozone, pollution, weather and microclimate zone data supplied by the city. The app also won the health and fitness category in Qualcomm’s UPLINQ hackathon last week, according to an update on the company’s Facebook page.

Oberding and Norderhaug are collecting early user feedback to iterate in preparation for a forthcoming national launch.

They’re taking the bottom-up approach to finding users by going straight to patients instead of through doctors or health plans. “One of the real benefits of focusing on patients now is you really learn to satisfy the main users,” Oberding explained. “We’re working with local people with RA and other autoimmune conditions, reaching out to the community, interviewing them and connecting with them.”

[Image credits: Flickr user Kevin Dooley, App Store]

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