Her name is Lo. She is my partner, and she is one of the strongest people I know. She also lives with a stack of conditions that most people carry just one of… she carries them all at once.
Each one has its own rhythm. They overlap, they trigger each other, and they rarely show up on the same day in the same way. Medication for one condition triggers side effects for another, and vice versa. A good morning can turn into a hard afternoon for reasons that feel invisible. For years, the honest answer to "why do you feel like this today" was "I don't know."
Watching tracking fall apart
We tried everything to get ahead of it. Paper journals. Notes on her phone. Spreadsheets. Reminders. Three or four different apps, each one built for a single condition and blind to the rest.
Every one of them asked too much. Long forms, cold charts, and screens so crowded you freeze before you log a single thing. On the days we most needed to track something, we had the least energy to fight with an app to do it. So the tracking stopped, right when the data would have mattered most.
And even the notes we did manage to keep just sat there. Scattered across five places, never adding up to an answer she could bring to a doctor or use to change her day.
She was doing all the work of tracking and getting none of the understanding back.
A different question
So I started asking a different question. Not "how do we make her track more," but "what if logging was simpler, and handed her back information we could never spot on our own."
She had been Google searching, with AI summaries, about these new diagnoses. What to do, how she was feeling, what to expect from medications and treatments. The problem is that AI by default has no context. It knows nothing about her history or her conditions, so we had to re-explain as much as we could at the start of every new chat. That leaves so much more room for error and misinformation. Not to mention the time it sucked away. See the issue?
So what if the AI did know all of her history, her medications, and every question and concern that came before? What if it was one friendly tap instead of a form. Warmth and color instead of a clinical dashboard. A little companion that quietly watches the data pile up and says, in plain English, "I noticed your pain tends to be worse after nights under six hours." The kind of pattern that is obvious in hindsight and impossible to catch in the moment.
That was the whole idea. Make the logging effortless enough that she keeps doing it, then do the hard part for her.
Made to be played
We are a big gamer family. On the hard days, Lo reaches for the merge and recipe games she loves. Not just because they are fun, but because those little loops of progress give her mind somewhere gentle to go while her body is loud. I watched those games do something no health app ever had. They kept her coming back, day after day.
So I built that same pull into Bohpoli. Every check-in earns experience and resources to grow a garden that is truly hers. Streaks that celebrate showing up. Small wishes and rewards that turn a chore into something closer to play. The goal was never to trick her into logging. It was to make the thing that helps her feel a little like the thing she already loves to open.
The garden has become a family project too. Our oldest daughter is drawing the plants by hand, so what grows on the screen is truly ours.
Because a pattern only appears if the data keeps flowing, and a tracker you abandon in week two knows nothing about you. Bohpoli had to be something she wanted to come back to, even on a day when opening one more app felt like too much.
What Bohpoli became
It started as a surprise. I built a proof of concept and showed it to Lo. It was an emotional, happy moment. But most importantly, with her knowing about it, we could now collaborate together, and she could tell me what worked, what did not, and what she actually needed. It has been the two of us building it together ever since. Every screen is tested against a real body on a real hard day, and if a feature makes her tired to use, it does not make the cut.
It became one hold-to-log button for symptoms, meds, mood, food, water, and sleep. A garden that grows as she checks in, so the habit sticks long enough for patterns to form. Trends that connect sleep to pain to mood over weeks. And a companion she can ask when she needs to make sense of a rough stretch or prep for an appointment.
Because it was forged with someone juggling this many overlapping conditions, it can take whatever you throw at it. But you do not need a diagnosis to use it. You just need a little curiosity about your own body.
Built on trust, first
I have been privileged enough to work for three major hospital systems across the country the past eight years, so I fully understand that health data is the most personal data there is. I built Bohpoli for the person I love, which means I built it the way I would want her information handled. Private by default, encrypted, and never sold. That is not a marketing line. It is the only version of this app I was ever willing to ship.
If Bohpoli helps even one more person go from "I don't know" to "now I understand," it will have been worth every second spent building it. Lo was the first. I hope you are next.
