The Origin
From a spreadsheet to on-device forecasting.
I've had migraine for a very long time, but it was never a major concern for me until I went off to my first year of university. Right then, after years of regular, sporadic migraine, I was thrust into the difficult job of managing chronic migraine, mostly on my own, in an unfamiliar environment.
My physicians highly recommended I keep a migraine log to track severity progression over time, maybe to see if certain medications were effective or certain triggers could be elucidated. Being an analytical thinker, I was not content with just tracking date, time, and severity, and I spent hours and hours building a way to track my migraines using the only tool I had at the time, which was a spreadsheet on my computer. I had heard about apps that would serve as a companion for people with migraine, and I did look into them, but I was not at all satisfied. Why should I make an account and accept my data being offloaded to who-knows-where just to log my own health condition?
That spreadsheet method allowed me to collect years of my own history, but I still felt it was too limited, too isolated. I was clearly missing an entire world of data that would be impossible to manually record in a spreadsheet.
Then, I learned about machine learning and, more importantly, how to implement it. I had an epiphany.
Up to that point, all of my detailed, near-obsessive tracking had been backward-looking. It told me where I had been in pain, but gave me very little help in planning for tomorrow and the rest of my week. Machine learning offered a way to turn years of historical logs into forward-looking foresight by learning the complex patterns unique to my own physiology.
I built Migraine Navigator to provide that foresight without the privacy trade-offs of modern commercial apps, and I want to offer this to you and every person living with migraine. Everything computes locally on-device, giving you personalized daily risk forecasts while keeping your personal health records entirely in your own hands.