I hope all of you are well and having days with less pain. I wanted to talk to y'all about an app my brother is designing, name exactly that: Les Pain. The idea of the app is for it to be a companion for people like us that fight chronic pain daily. We submitted the vision for it to a start up competition and I am proud to say it was ACCEPTED as one of 8 finalists for a grand prize of $20,000 to help with the building of it. The plan is to work on making Les Pain better and release it as soon as this Spring. Here is some more about to help you understand better:

"While our solution is not a cure-all for chronic pain, we believe it can help patients in their fight to not lose as little function as possible. Our solution is an integrative and dynamic tool to monitor and improve outcomes of chronic pain patients through provider and community network. The app idea we came up with, Les Pain, is designed to do exactly this via increased data-driven compliance with a drug called exercise. Exercise is medicine that can prevent and treat chronic pain. Increased physical activity not only helps patients strengthen muscles but also helps the body make natural painkillers, endorphins. It may not seem like a big deal at first but it is challenging for chronic pain patients to keep up with their physical therapy as it is very easy to lose motivation and hope. Les Pain is designed to track and store the patient's daily pain level along with encouraging them to perform daily exercises. Patients and physicians will have access to all of this data and we hope it ultimately shows the patient that increased physical activity will not only lead to increased function but also decreased pain. Our solution hopes to overcome the challenges faced by many health apps, namely keeping users engaged. We anticipate building a user friendly interface where patients are encouraged to “level up” by performing their daily activities and recommendations. There will also be a community portion where patients can anonymously message each other and “like” each other’s achievements. Sometimes pain patients are the only ones that can relate with each other. The social network aspect is a way we can get greater patient engagement."

So to put it simply, our app will be more than a pain diary. You will be able to record your physical activity, track/rate your pain in a way more sophiscated than the normal pain scale out of 10, and see what you did on the days you fared better than usual and really understand it through data and charts. The question then becomes 'why am I telling this to you?' Well, it's pretty simple. I want YOUR opinions on what can make this idea better. What features would you like to see added that would get you to use something like this? There are no wrong or right answers and please be as honest as possible. The more feedback there is, the greater it will be. Thank you for your time!