I live with chronic pain and develop TideTrace primarily from an iPhone.

Living with symptoms that change over time has shown me how difficult it can be to reconstruct pain, medication use, and daily context from memory during a short medical appointment. I started TideTrace to create a record that remains useful first to the person living with the symptoms—not a system designed primarily to collect data for clinicians or researchers.

I maintain TideTrace, a local-first open-source web app for recording and reviewing pain, medication, notes, and user-exported health-context data.

TideTrace keeps user-entered records in the browser, allows users to export their own data, and does not send health records to an external server.

The project is designed around user control. People differ in what they need to record, how they understand their symptoms, and what they want to review, analyze, or share. TideTrace therefore aims to support configurable record categories, summaries, visual review, and personal interface choices.

Customization is not intended only as decoration. Allowing users to shape how the app looks, what it records, and how it presents their records may help create a stronger sense that the record belongs to them and remains under their control.