Aidy

The all-in-one app for living with Crohn's or Colitis

Health & Fitness

Biohacking

Health

Hey everyone, I’m Max, and today my co-founder @peter_crocker and I are excited to launch Aidy, a mobile app that helps people live better with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). At its core, Aidy provides an easy interface for IBD patients to log their key disease indicators, then applies an intelligence layer on top of this data to identify patterns, encourage better diet choices and treatment adherence, and allow for stronger communication with our users’ care teams. Over 3 million Americans live with IBD, with Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s Disease being the most common forms. IBD is caused by chronic inflammation in the gut and can be an absolutely debilitating disease that forces people to miss work, school, and social gatherings because they’re either stuck in bed or on the toilet. There is no cure for IBD, and it can be very expensive to treat. Many cases require biologic drugs that cost upward of $30,000 per year, and severe cases can require surgery to remove part (or all) of the colon. A close friend of mine who suffers from IBD would often complain about the mental burden of dealing with the disease. Each day, she juggled completing a doctor-recommended food diary, managing symptoms, and taking multiple prescriptions, all while the specter of an ER visit loomed if she screwed anything up. After some research, we realized there were no good tools to centrally manage all these aspects of IBD (or really any chronic illness), much less empower patients to improve their day-to-day experience living with it. There’s no shortage of widget apps that track stools, symptoms, diet, and meds, but none use best-in-class AI to untangle the complex relations between them all. On the other hand, lots of people we talked to would use ChatGPT to learn about their condition and treatments, but the lack of structured, user-specific context always limited the usefulness of the answers. Pretty quickly we started building an app that could offer the best of both worlds. Since launching the first version of Aidy a few months ago, we have seen the app’s core flow become self-reinforcing: the more people log, the more personalized and useful we can make their experience, and the more personalized and useful their experience, the more likely people are to keep logging! In our previous roles at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Health Initiative, U.S. Senate, and biotech startups, Peter and I were shocked at how infrequently self-reported health data is captured and used to support patients outside of clinical settings. Given how quickly AI models are improving, we realized there’s a ton of room for AI-infused digital health tools to both encourage better patient engagement and improve health outcomes. In the coming weeks, we plan to add more data connectors to Aidy, so our AI harness can build a more complete picture of how IBD impacts how our users’ lives. Next up are integrations with wearables (e.g. WHOOP, Oura) and the Apple HealthKit data, then eventually with clinical lab results, insurance info, and the like. Most of the app’s functionality isn’t necessarily specific to IBD, and we hope to expand to other chronic conditions in the near future! For now, the Aidy app is only directly useful for folks with IBD, but we have a few asks that may apply more widely: 1. If you know anyone who suffers from IBD, please let them know about Aidy! 2. If you know a GI doctor (especially one who treats many IBD patients), let them know about us. We’d love to earn their recommendation. 3. If you suffer from a different chronic health condition and would like a similar experience tailored to your condition, please let us know. 4. If you know anyone who evaluates digital health point solutions for health plans, we’d love to chat with them!