Curabrein
Four things, and then the detail.
Everything on this page is in the one payment. There is no higher tier, nothing is locked, and nothing stops working if you stop paying, because there is nothing to keep paying.
- 1Keep your days without it costing you the energy you were trying to save.
- 2See the patterns you cannot hold in your head, like the crash that arrives two days late.
- 3Have something to do on the bad days that will not ask you to push through.
- 4Hand your doctor a record they can actually read in ten minutes.
A few taps, and only the ones you asked for
Five energy levels, one tap. That is the whole daily minimum, and on a bad day it is all the app will ask of you.
Energy and spoons
If you count in spoons, set a budget for the day and log what things cost you. A shower, a phone call, an hour of work. The app keeps a running total against your budget, so you see the edge coming while you can still do something about it.
Sixteen symptoms, and you pick
Pain, sleep, concentration, headache, dizziness, nausea, breathlessness, stiffness, light and sound sensitivity, crowds, screens, palpitations, that flu-like feeling, stress and anxiety. Follow the ones that matter to you. The rest never appears again.
A body map
Tap where it sits, front and back, and say what it feels like: pain, tingling, numbness, tension, weakness, trembling, itching. Left and right are yours, not the screen's.
Sleep, honestly
How long you slept and whether you woke up rested are two different questions, so the app asks them separately. With these conditions that difference is often the entire point.
Mood and cycle, kept apart
Mood is on its own scale and is clearly not a screening questionnaire. If your symptoms follow your cycle, the app can put one against the other so you can see whether the pattern is really there.
A diary, when you want one
Write as much or as little as you like. Nothing you write reaches the doctor's document unless you tick it yourself.
A day without symptoms is still a day
You can record that nothing was wrong, and it counts as filled in. A gap in a record reads as neglect, and a good day is information too.
Seeing what you cannot hold in your head
Every column on this screen is one day, oldest on the left. Each row is one thing you follow, and the darker a cell, the more there was of it. A run of dark cells in the crash row, with dark cells in "over your budget" a day or two to the left, is the pattern nobody can keep track of from memory.
Your own delay
Post-exertional malaise usually arrives twelve to forty-eight hours after the effort. Note your crashes and the app works out the delay that is typical for you and the range it varies within, but only once there are enough of them to mean something, and it says how many it used.
Severity, duration, trigger
How bad it was, how long it lasted, and what you think set it off. Over the months this becomes the clearest page of your doctor's document.
What stands out, on its own screen
Observations about your own weeks get their own page rather than a card between the buttons of someone who just woke up. You go and look when you want to look.
A quiet signal
If it has been worse than your own average for a while, the app says so once, as a card. Not a notification, not a pop-up, and not a diagnosis. It reads back what you wrote, and nothing interrupts you.
For the days you already know are coming
Heavy days, marked in advance
A wedding, a hospital appointment, a long journey. Put it in beforehand, and afterwards the app can tell you whether a crash followed, and how often that turns out to be true for you.
A crash plan you wrote yourself
What helps you when it hits, who to tell, what can wait. You build it from sentences that people with these conditions actually use, and you choose which ones are yours. It is not standard advice, and it is there when you are in no state to think it up.
Milestones that are not pats on the back
"Four weeks recorded" says nothing. "From now on the overview can put this period next to the previous one" is a reason to keep going. That is the kind of milestone this app marks.
Help, right now
A page you can reach in one tap from the home screen, with the emergency and helpline numbers that apply to your own country rather than a single number that is wrong for most people reading it.
What you take, and what happened after it changed
With reminders, if you want them
Doses you tick off are counted. A dose you did not tick is recorded as "not filled in" rather than "missed", because the app does not know which it was and your doctor's document should not pretend otherwise.
Before and after a change
When a dose changes, the app puts the four weeks before next to the four weeks after. It does not tell you whether the medicine works. It shows you two periods and leaves the conclusion to you and your doctor.
As-needed medicines, counted in days
Days, not tablets. Two doses on one day count as one day. That is the unit the guidance on medication-overuse headache is written in, so it is the only count a doctor can do anything with.
Too recent to compare
A change from last week gets no comparison at all, just a line saying it is too soon. The first weeks after a change are never representative anyway.
Nothing here asks you to push through
The list is filtered by the conditions you selected. If you have ME/CFS, nothing that asks for real exertion can appear anywhere in the app. That rule is not a line in a document, it is checked automatically every time the app is built.
A body scan that walks your attention through you one part at a time, with your companion sitting alongside. Breathing with a ring that swells and settles on a real clock, and a rhythm you choose yourself: a longer out-breath, even, box, or a shorter gentle one when four counts is already too much.
Grounding for when a room is too much: naming five things you can see, holding something cold, turning the noise down step by step. Shoulder and leg movements at a pace a moving dot shows you, because "slowly" means nothing until you see it. Getting out of bed and standing up without the room tilting. And exercises for a hard moment, a painful moment, and for starting again after a long stretch of nothing.
A few of them ask you to put the phone down and do them away from the screen. Those say so before you start, instead of pretending to be something you tap through.
- Nothing is counted, nothing is scored, nothing congratulates you
- Pause and skip are always on screen, and stopping halfway is offered rather than punished
- Every animation stops if your phone says reduce motion
These keep getting better. New exercises are being added, and the ones that are here get reworked whenever somebody tells me what does not sit right. Physiotherapy movements with real pictures are next.
Eighty-four conditions, written to be read on a bad day
Every one of them says what it is, the single symptom you need to understand before the rest makes sense, what can help, what to be careful with, and the warning signs that mean you should call someone today rather than wait.
Short paragraphs, plain words, no cheerfulness. Each page was researched, written, sourced and checked one at a time, and it lists where it got that from. This was by far the slowest part of building the app, and it is the part that has to be right.
Energy and pain · 9
Physical · 23
Neurological · 33
Mental health · 19
Read aloud, with your place kept
If reading is hard, the app reads a page to you with your device's own voice and draws an outline around the part it is speaking, so you can follow along. It scrolls to keep up with itself.
Questions to take with you
Each condition comes with questions worth asking your doctor about it. Tap one and it goes onto your list, and from there onto your document.
It knows which exercises fit
Choosing your conditions is what filters the exercises. Nothing unsafe for you can turn up, anywhere in the app.
More are coming
Eighty-four is where this starts. New conditions are still being written, and if yours is missing you can say so from inside the app.
A document that looks like a medical document
Because that is what gets read in a ten minute appointment. Your name and the period on every page. Days filled in, average energy, crashes, rest moments, and a table comparing this period with the one before it.
Then the questions you wrote down beforehand with a line under each to note the answer, medication and what happened after a dose changed, your as-needed use counted in days, symptoms in numbers, the body map, energy per day, load against your own budget, where the energy went, your crashes with their delays, and any diary entries you ticked to bring along.
At the top it states plainly that these are notes a person kept and not a measurement. That sentence is there so nobody has to argue about it.
- Print it, mail it, or hand over your phone
- Nothing appears on it that you did not choose to put there
- A worked example is built into the app, so you can see it on day one
In your own language. The app and this document are in Dutch, English and French today, with German and Spanish being finished. So you hand your doctor something written in the language you both actually speak.
Page 1 of 4 · the worked example that is built into the app
Four to choose from, and none at all is also a choice.
It breathes with you during an exercise, reacts when you finish something, sits with you while you rest, and falls asleep in the evening. It asks you one thing a day and "not now" is always an answer. Give it a name, or turn it off entirely and the app works exactly the same.
The accessibility is the product, not a settings page
Large text, all the way up
Every screen is tested at double text size on a small phone. Not "mostly works". Tested, automatically, on every build.
Motion you can switch off
If your system setting says reduce motion, the app obeys it everywhere. With vestibular conditions and migraine that is not a nicety.
Four themes
Paper, ink, chalk and night, plus one that follows the time of day and one that follows your phone. The night theme is warm rather than black, so it does not glare at three in the morning.
Three languages, two more coming
Dutch, English and French are complete. German and Spanish are being finished and are not offered until they are.
Tell me what is missing, from inside the app
A condition that is not in the library, a helpline that is wrong for your country, an exercise that does not sit right. There is a page for it in the app, and it comes straight to me.
Private because of how it is built, not because of a promise
No internet permission
Android lists the permissions an app has, and this one does not have that one. The app is not able to send your record anywhere, so you do not have to take anyone's word for it.
Encrypted on your own phone
Everything you write is encrypted on your device, with a key kept in the Android Keystore. There are no servers, so there is nothing to break into and nothing for me to hand over.
A lock on the app itself
You can put a lock on Curabrein separately from your phone's own lock. Not against a thief, that is what your phone lock and the encryption are for, but against the ordinary moment where somebody picks up your unlocked phone.
No account and no analytics
Nothing to sign up for, no email address to give away, and nobody counting what you tap. This website holds itself to the same rule: no fonts from Google, no scripts from anyone else, and no cookie banner, because there is nothing to consent to.
All of that, once, for €9.99.
No subscription, no advertising, no account, and no internet permission.
