Our Mission

4YouandMe is a nonprofit built to empower individuals interested in sharing their own health-related data and insights for the benefit of all.

Using smartphones and other wearables, we work towards enabling people to better avoid and or navigate their chronic medical conditions.

We do this by engaging feasibility studies primarily carried out with our coalition partners who design the needed apps, tools, and approaches to analyzing the collected data. We consider that this must be done within a system where insights and support are built by each other for each other.

We are actively developing research cohorts around the world to understand the feasibility of connected digital tools including mobile phone apps and wearable devices to detect and track stress and individual symptom trajectories of disease.

Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, we are hoping to find detectable and clinically meaningful signals in data emanating from these digital tools that might be used to forecast impending disease onset, relapse or worsening across a wide range of chronic diseases and vulnerable life periods where individuals are undergoing metamorphoses such as pregnancy.

The goal of all our work is to shift agency and control back to individuals in the daily management of their health with the hope that this might translate into innovative and cost-effective individualised care strategies to help prevent and better manage chronic conditions. We are dedicated to making the work products and outcomes from our research available to the universe of interested and qualified researchers to continue this work within each disease group.

We hope small and large groups around the world will take these findings, algorithms, and tools to track symptom changes and freely use them to extend our work in their specific areas of interest. Below are some of our studies which we are in the process of updating to reflect our active studies, poised to start studies and completed studies.

• Stress and Recovery
• Stress in Crohn’s study
• CNS Tumour Detection Study
• BUMP study

Symptom trajectories have been historically characterised by sporadic and mostly visible data captured during clinical visits.

This approach, which dominates our current healthcare models relies on patients subjective reporting of symptoms, and typically waiting until individuals are sick enough to make an appointment to see a doctor or worse, having to go to the hospital. Prevention is currently and has been a buzz word, yet our approaches to medicine are still stuck in an acute care clinical setting.

Further, disease is defined crudely – encompassing arbitrary bins of symptoms that add up to a diagnosis. We know that chronic conditions are not one size fits all, which results in large proportions of patients being missed, or being provided with an ineffective treatment. The recent advancements in wearable technology to detect objective signs of stress and symptoms of disease provides us with an exciting opportunity to use this technology to understand individual trajectories of disease that are true to an individual, not averaged or forced to fit into a predefined box and can be used at the comfort of one’s home and during their daily lives with minimal interference.

We aim to detect and forecast individual symptom transitions and shift trajectories of health to those which cannot be confined to the standard office clinical visit. The data we are collecting across studies will essentially allow us and others to build comprehensive metabolic maps for individuals which could provide new insights into disease progression, etymology and perhaps how we conceptualise health and disease.