I was absolutely sick of paper symptom booklets. You know the ones—your oncology team gives them to you, you're supposed to fill them in daily, and absolutely nobody ever actually does. They sit in a drawer and gather dust while you forget what you felt like three days ago.
So I built a custom GPT instead. It's free. It works. And it actually gets used instead of sitting in a drawer.
What It Does
Every morning and evening, you check in with the tracker. It asks about:
- Energy levels (are you actually awake?)
- Sleep quality (did you sleep, or just lie in bed?)
- Pain (where, how much?)
- Nausea (manageable or genuinely shit?)
- Mood (how are you handling it emotionally?)
- Interventions (what helped today?)
That's it. Quick. Takes about 60 seconds. Either text or voice input—and voice input is crucial for rough days when typing feels impossible.
What Makes It Actually Useful
It remembers everything. After a few weeks of check-ins, you can ask it: "What patterns do you see?" And it'll tell you. Like: "Your nausea is consistently worse on infusion days. On day two of the cycle you're averaging 30% lower energy. Paracetamol seems to help more than ibuprofen."
That's the real value. Not just tracking for tracking's sake, but spotting patterns that your brain, fried from treatment, genuinely can't see.
It compares cycles. You can ask: "Was Cycle 4 worse than Cycle 3?" And it'll pull the data and tell you. Which helps when you're trying to decide if the new dosage is actually helping or if you're just having a good week.
It's conversational. You can ask it things. "Should I be concerned about this symptom?" (It'll tell you to ask your doctor, but it'll also tell you what patterns it sees.) "What happened on days when I felt best?" It can answer that.
The Voice Thing
On rough days, I don't want to type. Chemo brain, fatigue, nausea—sometimes the barrier to logging a symptom is just friction. With voice input, you can just talk at your phone for 30 seconds and you're done.
It transcribes, it logs, it remembers. Zero friction.
It's Genuinely Free
No account required. No weird subscription. No data collection beyond what you tell it. Share the link with friends. Use it. Adapt it. Build your own version. I genuinely don't care—I just want people to have tools that actually work.
How To Use It
This is built as a custom GPT, which means you need a ChatGPT account (free or paid). You can access it directly and start logging immediately. No setup. No configuration. Just start talking to it.
Set a habit. Morning and evening. Takes literally a minute each time. And after a few weeks, the patterns start emerging.
Adapt It
The beauty of this is that you can tell the tracker what matters to you. If neuropathy is your thing, ask it to add neuropathy tracking. If blood sugar is a concern, add that. It's flexible. It's yours.
If you want to modify the prompt or build something similar in your own custom GPT, happy to share the underlying instructions. Open source, remember?
Why This Matters
Because managing chemo is a data problem. Your body is changing daily. Your side effects are changing. The things that help are changing. And your brain is basically not helping with any of this.
Tools that let you log what's happening without friction are genuinely valuable. And then tools that analyse what you've logged and spot patterns—that's where AI actually becomes useful instead of just hype.
Try it. Use it daily. See what patterns emerge. And if it doesn't work for you, share that too. I want to know.
Because someone reading this right now is tired of paper booklets, and you deserve something better.