I've had psoriasis since I was a child. For most of that time, no one taught me anything about it — not me, not my mother. We didn't know weather could affect it. We didn't know food could affect it. We didn't know anything beyond the fact that I had it and it hurt.
I tried to figure it out the only way I knew how: a notebook. I wrote down what I ate. That's all I knew to write down. I kept it for a few days, then I left it. It didn't tell me anything because I had no idea what else to track.
I went to about 50 doctors over the years. Most of them gave me a cream and called the next patient. There's almost no time, no real attention, no follow-up. You're handed a tube and sent home, and the next time anyone asks you about your skin is your next appointment, weeks or months away. So you go home and you keep pulling at the thick layers of dead skin yourself — until they bleed — because you don't know what else to do.
One doctor was different. Out of all of them, one. She gave me a shampoo and creams that actually worked. But the part I still get chills about wasn't the products. It was that she didn't wait until the next appointment — she asked me to call her in three days and tell her how my skin had reacted. Three days. That level of attention, that someone was actually paying attention to me as a person and not as a slot in a schedule, was so foreign that I remember it years later.
That's how rare it was to be cared for properly.
The information gap is huge. If you have a chronic skin condition and you don't have someone in your life who already knows about it, you spend years — I have spent years — trying to piece together what's happening to you. AI is finally helping with that now. It can answer questions in a way that doctors don't have time to. But there's still so much that a normal person doesn't know, because they're not a doctor, and the system isn't built to teach them.
About ten months ago I thought to myself: I'm a developer. I have this condition. I should put those two things together and try to make something good out of it. So I started building Ninoa.
Ninoa is what I wish my mother and I had when I was a kid. Something that helps you see what's affecting your skin — not just food, but weather, sleep, mood, hormones, all of it together. Something that doesn't make you wait until the next appointment to figure out what's going on. Something that pays attention to you the way that one good doctor did.
I'm still learning. I'll probably be learning my whole life — that's what this condition is. But the goal of Ninoa is that nobody else should have to start from zero like I did.
If you have a chronic skin condition and you've felt alone in figuring it out — you're not alone. That's part of why Ninoa exists. There's a community inside the app, too, because nobody should have to do this by themselves.
— Marika