What does Celie do?

Celie uses machine learning to compare and match people with similar medical symptoms, without relying on a previous diagnosis. Let’s say you’ve developed weird headaches that are totally derailing your life, and your doctor isn’t sure what’s going on or how best to help you. Celie will take a history, asking all about your headaches, how and when they occur, any other symptoms you have, and what remedies you’ve tried so far. Then she’ll use an algorithm to figure out how your headaches compare to other people’s. She’ll show you breakdowns of which treatments worked best for people with headaches that most closely match yours. You can also directly connect with people with matching headaches to compare notes, or start a question thread. You might find out about an unusual medication or herbal remedy that you can ask your doctor about trying. You might make friends with someone who totally gets how annoying your specific headache is, and they might recommend you a really great headache specialist. And the whole time this is happening, you and your matching headache buddies are helping to build a rich and detailed dataset for future headache research.

Who is Celie for?

Celie is for people with a chronic health complaint, no matter how big or small. We particularly want to cater to people who have had a hard time getting answers from mainstream medicine. If you are diagnosed with a vague catch-all condition, or your diagnosis keeps changing, or you can’t even get a diagnosis, it’s probably time to try Celie.

What if I do have a confirmed diagnosis?

Celie is for you, too. In fact, your diagnostic data could be really valuable for pointing other users in the right direction. Plus, there’s still a lot you could learn about your health by using Celie – you could be part of a diagnostic sub-group, or have an unusual comorbidity, or there might be clues in your data that certain treatments would work better for you than others. Even if you have a really standard presentation of your condition, you can still benefit from connecting with other users who really get what you’re going through and you can help advance medical research by sharing your symptoms and experience.

So can Celie diagnose me?

Celie is not a diagnostic machine, and she can only make suggestions based on patterns she observes in your data. You will still need to work with your human doctor to pinpoint a diagnosis. Celie is designed to work in conjunction with and fill the gaps in conventional medicine, so it’s important to continue to visit your human doctor and follow their advice. But if your human doctor is not helpful or receptive, other Celie users may be able to point you in the direction of a better one.

How does Celie do what she does?

Celie uses a machine learning technique called unsupervised learning to create a complex map of chronic illness patients, so that she can look for patterns in the symptoms people experience. If you’d like to learn more about how Celie works, check out our video.

How is Celie different from general symptom tracking apps?

Symptom tracking apps are great, but we find them a little hard to keep up with. Celie takes one super-detailed history when you sign up, so you don’t have to keep on top of updating her every day. She also does something no existing symptom tracker does, which is use population data from the rest of her user base to give you brand new insights that you wouldn’t be able to get from your symptoms alone. She also gives you the opportunity to match with and talk to other people struggling with the same symptoms. And as if that’s not enough, by telling Celie about your symptoms you are helping drive the next generation of chronic illness research.

I already belong to an online group for my condition. Why would I use Celie instead?

Online groups can be seriously useful, but people we surveyed also reported finding them depressing, toxic, or just kind of overwhelming. On Celie, the opportunity to connect is there, but on low energy days you can just log on to find out what medication works best for nausea and go back to bed without having to talk to anyone. Plus, the insights you get are automated and take the whole user population into account, rather than you having to ask multiple people individually and try to decide whose advice to take. And did we mention you’re helping research?

Why is her name Celie?

Celie’s job is to build a complex map of connections between patients and to help them to work together to create a better understanding of chronic illness. Her name was inspired by the mycelial network, an amazing natural phenomenon that connects trees and allows them to share information and resources so that the whole group can flourish.