Your patient handed you a report from Crohn’s Food Tracker. Here’s what’s behind it.

What the patient logs

• Meals — foods eaten, meal type, and a three-point tolerance rating (fine / meh / nope) recorded at the time of the meal. Symptoms can be attached to the meal on the same screen.
• Symptoms — abdominal pain, urgency, diarrhea, blood in stool, constipation, bloating, nausea, fatigue, night waking, fever, loss of appetite, joint pain, mouth ulcers and headache, each rated mild / moderate / severe with a timestamp. Stool form is recorded on the Bristol scale. Patients can also record a “felt fine today” day, which is stored as an explicit symptom-free observation.
• Medications — name and time taken, from which the report derives an adherence view.
• Hydration, weight and lifestyle — fluid intake, weight over time, sleep, stress and activity. With the patient’s opt-in, weight, sleep, water and steps can be read from Apple Health or Health Connect.

What the report contains

A patient chooses a range — 7 days, 30 days or custom — and the app produces a PDF with: symptom severity over time (one line per symptom), a symptom-by-severity breakdown, severity by time of day, stool patterns, top tolerated foods, likely aggravators with the observation counts behind them, medication history, hydration averages, weight trend, and free-text notes. The number of days actually logged in the range is stated, so a sparse record reads as sparse.

How the “likely trigger” list is produced

Each logged meal containing a food is one observation of that food. Every observation enters the denominator, including meals the patient rated fine. Each observation is given an adverse weight from 0 to 1: a “nope” rating counts fully, “meh” partially, symptoms attached to the meal are scored by severity, and a separate symptom entry within 24 hours counts at reduced weight — and is capped lower still when the patient explicitly rated that meal fine, so an unrelated flare does not implicate everything eaten that day. Where several sources describe the same meal, the maximum is used rather than the sum.

The raw adverse rate is then shrunk toward a prior with a small number of pseudo-observations and hard-capped by sample size. In practice a food cannot reach the top confidence tier (“Very likely”) on fewer than about eight consistent observations; two coffees and two bad mornings read “Possibly”. The label shown is one of Watching / Possibly / Likely / Very likely, alongside “n of m meals preceded symptoms” so the sample is visible.

It is an association in self-reported data — a hypothesis for you and the patient to test, not a finding. The app does not recommend elimination; the report exists so the conversation can start from counts rather than recollection.

What it is not

Crohn's Food Tracker is educational support and a self-tracking tool. It is not a medical device and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always talk to your gastroenterologist or care team before changing your diet, medication or treatment. If you have severe pain, persistent bleeding, a high fever or signs of obstruction, seek urgent care.

The app does not detect red-flag presentations and does not attempt to. Community content within the app is written by patients, is pseudonymous, and is labelled as such.

Data handling

Entries are stored in the patient’s own account. The patient can export all of their data and delete their account, with all data, from inside the app. Health data is not sold or shared with advertisers. An optional “care partner” view lets a patient share hydration and medication adherence — and nothing else — with a family member; symptom and stool data are excluded from that view by design and cannot be added.

Cost to the patient

Logging is free. A patient’s first comprehensive report is free after seven days of tracking. Unlimited PDF reports and the deeper trigger analysis are part of an optional subscription. Nothing on this page requires it.

Questions

The app is built and maintained by Elco Dev, LLC, founded by a person living with IBD. Clinical or data questions: austin@elcodev.com.