Interview with James Allen - Developer of the Chronic Insights App

Jayson:

Welcome to this episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. This is going to be really a neat episode because I've got James Allen on the line. James is a fellow ankylosing spondylitis person. And James has developed a really cool app called Chronic Insights. And James, how are you doing today?

James:

Hi, Jayson. I'm not too bad today. Yeah, you know, the usual ups and downs, aches and pains, as we all know, but yeah, today, I guess is about, I'd say, three or four out of 10 on the pain scale, so not too bad. How are you?

Jayson:

Oh, I'm doing great. Today was my Cosentyx day. So that means we're gonna have a good day. I've learned something new. As people that are listening to the show. I learned a new word and I want to share it and it's called Kip, and I have no idea that that's a British word for taking a nap.

James:

Yeah, sometimes if you're feeling really tired, you just need to go have a Kip for 10 minutes.

Jayson:

There we go. What a cool word man. That is awesome. So James, why we are talking is not only just because you have Ankylosing Spondylitis, but I first want to talk about Chronic Insights for a few minutes. Tell the listeners, what is it, what can they do with this app? Because it's really cool, but I'd rather have you tell them.

James:

So Chronic Insights is essentially, it's a symptom diary. It's an app that I've been working on for about a year now. You can it's available on the Google Play Store, and also on testflight, which is Apple's version of beta testing. So not officially released yet. It's really version 1.0. It's a bit rough around the edges and I'm looking to get people to try it out for me and give me some feedback. And what it does is quite simple really allows you to record your symptoms throughout the day, whether that's pain or fatigue, stiffness, anxiety, mobility issues, any symptom that you want to track. So it's mainly for people with chronic pain or chronic fatigue, people like us with Ankylosing Spondylitis, or other potentially other conditions as well like Fibromyalgia or other forms of arthritis, Endometriosis. I mean, the list is endless the number of conditions which involved chronic pain and fatigue. So you can record say, right now, I mentioned before, I'm probably about three out four out of 10. I can just record that in the app, it's captured. I don't have to remember that. I can also record where on the body the pain is. So at the moment, it's kind of my middle of my back right now, but throughout the day, it shifts and changes maybe it'll be my shoulders layer, or my hips, and so buying, tracking and recording throughout the day, you can then look back on your symptoms and see, what are the trends or the patterns? What are the things that I've trained that have potentially impacted my symptoms? And and what does that look like when you look at the, the graphs and the charts that are available? And what does it look like visually on the body, as are there particular areas of the body, they're affected more or less over, you know, on average. So that's, that's essentially what it does in an in a nutshell.

Jayson:

As you said, you can record the different items through the day, but you can record them the way the graphs are set up in there. If I'm having pain in my spine, I can actually pull up the copy of a skeleton and circle the spine. If I'm having muscle pain, I can pull up a full body image, not me but just have a representation and circle the part of the body that is hurting so maybe it's your rib cage and it's hurting one day, but it's your Left leg the next day. You can you can adjust and it's not just some, you know, static figure you're able to bounce back and forth between skeletal and muscular pain.

James:

Yes. I mean, that was one of the main goals of creating the app because there are other symptom...