I know how this feels from the inside.
This is the one page where you hear from me rather than about the app.
I have functional non-epileptic seizures and PTSD. It took years before anyone could tell me what I actually had.
Those years are their own kind of hard. What you have is real and it shapes every week of your life, and the answer you keep getting is that nothing shows. After long enough you stop expecting to be taken at your word, and you start explaining less, which of course only makes it worse.
That is not really what this page is about, though. What matters is that I know how it feels from the inside. That is the whole reason the app is shaped the way it is: no goals, no streaks, nothing that tells you that you could have done better.
The idea came from my psychologist. I was building a game at the time, and she asked whether I could make apps as well. I said I would like to try. I kept trying and kept building, and Curabrein is where that ended up. We still go through it together and work out what could be better.
I know an app is not a cure, and I would never pretend otherwise. But if it gives somebody a little help in a hard stretch, that is genuinely enough for me. That is the whole goal.
YentheBelgium
Who it is for
For people whose illness fluctuates and does not show on the outside. ME/CFS, long COVID, POTS, fibromyalgia, migraine, vestibular conditions, and the many others where nothing turns up on a scan.
Two things are true for almost all of them. You lose track of your own weeks, because brain fog takes the details and because a bad month blurs into the one before it. And you are often not believed, because there is nothing to point at.
So this app is built for that, and not for fitness. It has no goals, no streaks, no congratulations, and it never once tells you that you could have done better. Resting is not a failure state here. A day where you did nothing is a day the app is glad to record.
How it was built
Slowly, and by looking at it. Every screen is tested at double text size on a small phone, automatically, on every build. The exercises are filtered so that nothing asking for real exertion can reach someone with ME/CFS, and that rule is checked by the machine every time, because it is exactly the kind of thing you cannot leave to memory.
The condition pages were written, sourced and checked one at a time. That was the slowest part by a long way, and it is the part that has to be right, so it took as long as it took.
The app has no internet permission. That decision came first and everything else was built around it.
What it is not
Curabrein is not a medical device. It does not diagnose and it gives no treatment advice. It keeps your record and it gives you information. What that record means is a conversation between you and your doctor, and the document says so at the top of the first page.
It is not finished, and it is not supposed to be.
Eighty-four conditions is where the library starts, not where it stops. More are being written, and each one takes as long as it takes, because a page that is wrong is worse than a page that does not exist yet.
More exercises are coming too, including physiotherapy movements with real pictures instead of written descriptions. The app will keep being worked on for as long as people are using it.
The people using it decide what comes next. If something you need is missing, tell me, and it moves up the list. That is not a nice thing to say on a website. It is how the order actually gets decided.