A record for conditions that don't hold still.
Hephaestus is a longitudinal tracking platform for CRPS and related high-impact neuropathic pain conditions — built around the fact that these conditions flare, fade, and change shape between visits.
The gap
Memory isn't built for this.
CRPS doesn't sit still long enough to describe accurately after the fact. Symptoms spike and recede over hours or days, function shifts along with them, and by the time a patient is back in front of a clinician, most of that detail is gone — filtered through recall, compressed into a few sentences. Clinicians end up working from an incomplete picture. Researchers end up short on the kind of continuous, structured data that could describe how these conditions actually behave over time.
What it tracks
- Symptoms Reported directly, close to when they happen — not reconstructed weeks later.
- Function What actually changes day to day, beyond a single pain score.
- Treatment events What was tried, and when, placed on the same timeline as everything else.
- Context The everyday variables patients already suspect matter.
- Physiology Passive signal from a wearable — starting with a smart ring, not tied to one device.
What it doesn't do
Hephaestus doesn't diagnose. It doesn't predict flares. It doesn't recommend treatment, and it isn't a biofeedback tool. It's a record — built to be accurate and complete, not to act on the person keeping it.
Where it stands
Hephaestus is early. It starts with adults with CRPS — a condition that's severe, highly variable, and hard to monitor between visits — with an eye toward extending to other high-impact neuropathic pain conditions as the record proves itself. The near-term question is a plain one: can this be kept up consistently, and is what it produces actually useful to the people relying on it.