
I had a foot of my small intestine removed and I'm building Gut.ai - rahulponnala
http://gut.ai
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rahulponnala
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
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.

~~~
rahulponnala
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.

