A while back I wrote about building a sailing app for my Samsung watch which has gone through a lot of evolution over the years including a phone app and many more features. That’s a pretty typical story for me: I keep running into the same problem, get annoyed enough about it, and eventually just build the thing. This post is two more of those. Neither has anything to do with sailing. Both have to do with pain, my wife’s and my own.
Neither of them was some big business plan. I made them because I wanted them to exist and they didn’t.
Pain Analytics, which I built for my wife
My wife lives with a chronic pain condition. If you’ve watched someone go through that, you’ll know how much quiet work happens underneath it. There’s this constant background effort to work out what made a bad day bad. Was it the weather, or too much screen time, or something she ate, or a flare that actually started three days ago and only showed up now? Day to day you can’t really tell. The patterns are there but they’re stretched across so much time that nobody can hold them in their head.
So she did what plenty of people do and tried the pain tracking apps. A lot of them. And she kept hitting the same wall. Getting data into them was fine. Getting it back out was the problem. Hardly any of them let you export your history properly, and I don’t think we found a single one that would export years of it in bulk.
That export gap was the thing that mattered most to her. She didn’t want a diary. She wanted to take a long stretch of data across different treatments and different months and actually work with it. Look at the patterns herself. Put it through an LLM to help surface correlations. Walk into an appointment and hand her pain specialist a full record instead of trying to reconstruct six months of flares from memory in a fifteen minute slot.
So that’s what I built. Pain Analytics is a pain tracker built on the idea that your data belongs to you, and that it’s only worth anything if you can actually get it out.
The bits I cared about getting right:
– Logging that’s fast when you’re in the middle of a flare. There’s a Quick Log for when you just need it recorded, and a fuller entry for when you’ve got a minute. Pain level, location, type, duration.
– Tracking you can bend to fit you. Everyone describes their pain differently, so you can add your own pain types, set up your own triggers like screen time or weather or food, and track more than one location.
– Charts that show the shape of things over time, so the correlations you’d never catch on a given day start to become visible.
– Export that genuinely works, whether that’s for your own analysis, for an LLM, or for your doctor.
– Everything stays on your device. No account, nothing sold or handed off, and you can export or wipe it whenever you want.
One thing I want to be straight about, because it matters. Pain Analytics tracks and collects, and that’s all. It isn’t a medical device and it won’t diagnose anything or tell you what to do. Anything you notice in your own data is a conversation to have with a healthcare professional, not a call to make on your own. The point is to walk into those conversations with better information.
TypeRelief, which I built for me
The second one is a lot more selfish and I’m happy to own that.
I sit at a computer most of the day and I’ve got the full set for it: hypermobility, RSI and carpal tunnel. The advice is the boring kind that happens to be right. Move regularly, stretch, don’t stay locked in one position for hours. My problem is that I get hyperfocused. I drop into something and the next time I look up two hours have gone and my wrists are complaining.
I wanted a reminder to move. There are apps for that already, but none of them worked the way I needed. Most of them are a notification you have to look at. You feel the buzz, you check your phone or your watch, you read it, you register that it’s telling you to stretch, and by then you’ve lost your train of thought and you’re holding your phone, which never ends well.
I wanted something quieter. A nudge I could feel and understand without looking at anything. And I really wanted it to work in the moments where getting your phone out isn’t on, like when you’re in a meeting or on a call. That last part has been the best bit of the whole thing. I can get a prompt to roll my shoulders or stretch my wrists in the middle of a meeting and nobody around me has any idea it happened.
That’s TypeRelief. Break reminders to stay ahead of RSI, wrist pain and general desk fatigue before they dig in. It runs on your Android phone and your Wear OS watch and syncs across the two so the reminders come with you.
What it does, and what it deliberately doesn’t:
– Simple reminders, no guided workouts. It nudges you to stretch and move, it doesn’t run you through a program. Wrist stretch, finger stretch, neck roll, shoulder shrug, back stretch, eye rest, posture check, stand up, deep breath, quick break. Pick the ones you want or add your own.
– Set it around your day. Intervals anywhere from an hour up to eight hours, managed from your phone or straight off your wrist.
– Stays out of the way. It sits quietly in the background and won’t barge into your meetings or calls. One payment, no subscription.
If you’re a developer, writer, designer, analyst, or anyone else who vanishes into a screen and comes back sore, it might spare you the version of things where you’re the one shopping for wrist braces.
Why I bother with any of this
Neither of these is going to change the world and that was never the plan. Pain Analytics exists because someone I love was being let down by her tools and I could do something about it. TypeRelief exists because I was sick of my own bad habits and figured a small, well aimed nudge could sort them out.
That’s really the thread through everything I make. I build the thing I wish already existed, use it myself, then put it out in case it helps someone else. Both are up on Google Play now if you want to look, and both are a one-off with nothing recurring.
I’m planning to write more detailed posts on each of them later on, covering how they were built and what I picked up along the way. There’s more to that than I expected, because I leaned on AI heavily for both of them but went about it in almost opposite ways, and building them back to back changed how I think about making things like this. That’s a story for those posts though. If you end up trying either, I’d love to hear what you make of it.
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