Pacing Partner AI
Energy-aware scheduling and support for people with chronic illness — built by someone who lives it.
Managing a chronic illness takes a constant, exhausting effort of tracking, planning, and adjusting. Pacing Partner AI carries some of that weight — learning your patterns, adapting your schedule to your real capacity, and offering gentle guidance when thinking clearly is hard.
The Problem
Pacing — the practice of carefully managing energy to avoid crashes — is one of the most powerful tools people with ME/CFS and similar conditions have. But pacing itself is exhausting work.
Constant mental overhead
Every day requires tracking energy, planning activities, watching for warning signs, and making real-time decisions about what to do — or stop doing. This cognitive load is relentless, and it comes precisely when capacity is lowest.
Tools that log but don't learn
There are symptom trackers and task managers, but they don't talk to each other — and they don't adapt. You log faithfully, but the insights stay buried. The schedule never adjusts. Nothing closes the loop.
No support in foggy moments
When brain fog makes thinking hard, existing tools demand the most from you. What you need in that moment isn't a complex app — it's someone saying "here's the one thing that would help you right now."
How It Works
Pacing Partner AI is a conversational assistant that works over voice messages — the same way you'd message a friend. It logs what you share, learns your patterns over time, and returns guidance that fits your real capacity.
Voice-first logging
Send a voice message from your phone — how you're feeling, what you've eaten, what you've done, medications taken. Natural and low-effort, accessible even during flares when typing isn't. No forms, no checkboxes.
Energy-aware tracking
The system tracks energy across physical, mental, and social dimensions — and pays attention to when you're approaching your limits. When it notices you're in an overload zone, it adjusts its suggestions accordingly.
Pattern learning over time
Periodically, the system analyzes your logs — looking for correlations between activities, symptoms, and crashes. It identifies what tends to drain you, what helps you recover, and how your baseline shifts. These aren't generic insights. They're yours.
Adaptive daily scheduling
Each day, you receive a thoughtful schedule narrative — not a rigid agenda, but energy-paced guidance that reflects how you're actually doing. It respects pacing guardrails and "stop signals" instead of pushing productivity.
Brain fog support mode
When you're struggling to think clearly, the system simplifies completely. One step. The most helpful thing right now, based on what has actually helped you before — drawn from your own history, not a generic protocol.
Proactive check-ins
If you've been quiet for a while, the system reaches out. Gentle reminders for self-care routines, medications, and important tasks — timed to your patterns, not a generic schedule.
Who It's For
Pacing Partner AI is designed for people whose capacity is inconsistent and unpredictable — and for whom that inconsistency shapes every part of daily life.
This includes people living with:
- ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome)
- Long COVID
- Fibromyalgia
- POTS and dysautonomia
- Other complex chronic conditions where pacing is essential
If you've ever spent your limited energy figuring out how much energy you have — or pushed through something that felt okay and paid for it for days afterward — this system was built with you in mind.
It's not built for people who want to optimize productivity. It's built for people who are trying to protect their baseline and live as fully as possible within it.
"The goal isn't to do more. The goal is to do what matters, safely — and to have something carrying the mental load of figuring out what that is."
About the Builder
This is a disabled-for-disabled project — built by someone who needed it, for people who need it.
I have ME/CFS and chronic pain. For years, pacing was my lifeline — carefully managing energy, watching for warning signs, adjusting plans constantly. It worked. Through that careful, sustained effort, I built up from being bed-bound to being around 50% housebound.
But the work of pacing is never finished. The planning, the tracking, the constant recalibration — it takes up a significant amount of the very energy it's trying to preserve. That's what Pacing Partner AI is meant to change. I'm building this to make pacing support lighter and more accessible — for myself, and for others in similar situations.
This system isn't designed by researchers studying chronic illness from the outside. It's designed by me — someone navigating it daily — and built with the hope of eventually putting it in the hands of others who need it.
Project Status & Goals
Where things are now
Pacing Partner AI is in active personal use and ongoing refinement. The core loop — voice logging, pattern analysis, energy-aware scheduling, and brain fog support — is working and being improved through daily use.
Right now, I'm the primary user — running the system daily and using my own experience to drive refinement. The goal is to eventually expand access to a small group of disabled users whose feedback will shape ongoing development.
What comes next
The immediate priority is stability and cost reduction. AI API costs during development are significant — each bug can cost real money to diagnose and fix. Current work is focused on reaching a reliable, stable version that can serve as a meaningful reference implementation.
From there, the aim is to move toward a cheaper pre-trained model — reducing the ongoing cost barrier so that disabled users, many of whom are on fixed or limited incomes, can actually access and sustain use of the system.
The bigger picture
This project exists in a gap: tools built for and by disabled people, centered on pacing and lived experience rather than productivity metrics. The goal isn't to build a startup. It's to build something that works — and to make it as accessible as possible.
Feedback, ideas, and solidarity from others navigating chronic illness are always welcome.