I had a foot of my small intestine removed and I'm building Gut.ai

by rahulponnala • 10 years ago

4 3 10 years ago

I have been diagnosed with Crohn's Disease. After 2 years of debilitating pain, agony, and misdiagnosis by some of the best GI doctors in the US, my small intestine gave up and ruptured. I had to go through a small bowel resection and get a foot of my small intestine removed. My weight dropped to 119 lbs (and I'm 6 feet tall). I survived.

Since then (and prior), it's been a struggle juggling between doctors, handling meds (ordering and injecting/IV), checking disease activity, and several other things.

No one, nobody, has to go through this suffering.

I am building Gut.ai, an AI powered personal assistant to help Crohn's and Colitis patients to better manage the disease. Gut.ai's mission is to keep you in remission, until we find a cure.

To start with, Gut.ai will schedule appointments and order meds (incl. refrigerated meds like Humira Pens) for you.

nibs• 10 years ago

Celiac here. I went through a not nearly as bad although still 18 month long painful regression, diagnoses and recovery period before getting to my current better than ever state (thanks to diagnoses and fixing my diet). My brother and I wrote a learning algorithm in Go that allows you to log your food and how it made you feel, and then it evaluates that against all of the other things you have eaten and changes the score for that food. After a month or two of data you start to see compelling patterns, and it allows you to isolate single ingredients through continued trial and error. If something results in 10 bad experiences and no good ones, it is probably a trigger food and should be eliminated. On the opposite end, you can conclusively rule out foods by trialing them with a bunch of other ingredients and seeing if they cause problems.

I built it because three people I know went through processes similar to the one you describe and they found the trying foods process very hard to track in a way that made is easy to determine which foods were a problem. I never took it further but the Go app is deployable and I think there is a great service to be built I have just been busy with my day job. I think that if this job goes well I will have enough money to work on this mission full time and at that point I will revisit this project and try to make it more functional and integrate with other medical and health devices and APIs for easier logging and better correlations (ie. eat a food, that increases heart rate 10-20bpm indicating autoimmune response of some kind, that is automatically tracked and the food is scored lower).

I signed up on the website, first name starts with R and time around 21:20, feel free to email me and we can chat.

rahulponnala2• 10 years ago

Thanks so much for sharing your story. And thank you very much for signing up. You are awesome!

I'm sorry that you had to go through 18 months of struggle before the diagnosis. But glad that you have found a way to get into remission. That is fantastic!

Your learning algorithm sounds great! Would love to chat and learn more. Will absolutely reach out.

We are building a pattern recognition algorithm ourselves, that will accumulate data from your health reports (doctors visits, screenings, tests etc.) and help identify causes/issues/patterns, that will help you prevent flare-ups and keep the disease in remission.

I had a foot of my small intestine removed and I'm building Gut.ai

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