Releaf is a new app for IOS Apple and soon for Android that will be released later this month. CEO Franco Brockelman developed the app that tracks a user’s entire session of cannabis use.
When you start the app, you determine what you are attempting to treat, whether it’s pain, nausea, anxiety, etc. Then you select the strain and amount of cannabis you’re using.
“Then you let us know how you’re taking it, right now we’re focused on inhaling, with either smoking or vaporizing, but we’re working on the next version to look at tinctures and edibles,” Brockelman said.
The app has a puff button where each time you inhale you press it and the app records it. Then there are different feelings you can press.
Whether it’s feelings of hunger, euphoria, or pain alleviation, the user can press these feelings on or off depending on how your experience changes throughout the session.
According to Brockelman, everything you do in the app is recorded and time stamped so the user can track the change in pain level, or when they started feeling hungry.
At the end of the session the user can give a rating of that particular strain and amount from one to five stars.
“We take that data along with the feelings and aggregate all that data so that when you look at the cannabis you can see what the top feelings associated with it were, what was the rating you had, and how it helped the symptoms,” Brockelman said.
He first got the idea for the app from watching his own mother suffer from chronic pain. When commonly used opiate painkillers weren’t helping her, Brockelman suggested cannabis use for her pain.
His mother felt overwhelmed with the lack of information about medical cannabis and intimidated by the still very real stigma that surrounds it.
“Seeing how unapproachable cannabis was but how helpful it could be… We decided to build a tool that would make it more approachable,” Brockelman said.
Releaf is now finishing up the beta stage of the startup and Brockelman hopes that with the help of investors and users of the app that he can bring real help and knowledge to medical cannabis users.
“This tool will give people the power to come back to cannabis with a little more knowledge than they had the last time,” Brockelman said.
Once a solid user base has been developed, the company would like to take all the collected data from personal experiences and create an anonymous but comprehensive rating system for each strain.
That way, new and old users alike can see what other people have said about the strains they’re about to try. However that will come later, when more people have used the app. For now, Brockelman and his team just want to get the word out to test the app.
“The big goal is to help people live better lives.”
