When someone says “wellness app” what comes up to mind? Yoga? Guided meditation? Tracking your calories? Counting your steps?
Patrick Prioletti G’21 is creating two wellness apps, but they are a little different from the wellness apps you have on your phone right now.
Prioletti began working on Your Perfect Dose by chance. Retired chief neurosurgeon at Upstate, Gary Rodziewicz, needed someone to make an application for the perfect system he had formulated. After years of being a consultant in prescribing people dosages of cannabis for medical usage, Rodziewicz’s system proved to bring the efficacy of his patients from 40% to 75%.
As a student in the graduate program at the School of Information Studies, studying Applied Data Science, Prioletti was the perfect candidate for Rodziewicz.
After the two met at the Blackstone LaunchPad at the Syracuse University Libraries at the Bird Library, where Prioletti mentors, provided tech support, and had launched his own tech platform as a graduate student, Rodziewicz and Prioletti started working together.
Prioletti wrote an automation system to replicate what Rodziewicz was doing in his office. Your Perfect Dose started off as a website, but there weren’t enough users. Now, Prioletti is working on the app version of Your Perfect Dose to make it more accessible to people. Users can input their problems and check in to see how the recommended cannabis works for them. Think of the app as less of a prescription, more of a guide – like your local dispensary guy. It’s only three months till the testing stages of the app will begin.
This work made Prioletti more curious about wellness apps. After coming across a subreddit called r/micro-dosing, Prioletti went down a rabbit hole of psilocybin and psychedelic studies, and how they can help with personal wellness when used it right amounts.
The subreddit was full of people talking about studies and personal experiences of cases of depression – even end of life care terminal depression being helped with only one psilocybin trip. There have also been researches about people micro-dosing psilocybin and psychedelics under controlled environment with a therapist to treat their mental health as well.
Curious, Prioletti asked the subreddit if there is a website or application that they use to figure out how to micro dose properly. Since the answer was no, Prioletti decided he had to make one called Psily.
Prioletti’s goal with the application is not to guide people. The topic of psilocybin and psychedelics are still taboo and there is a lot of research to be done. Psily will allow users to track and record their usage, wellness, and other factors to help people find out what ideally works for their well-being.
The world of psychedelics and psilocybin may even likely become less taboo over the next decade with the data that Prioletti finds through his app. This would certainly be revolutionary for the world of health and well-being.
Story by LaunchPad Global Fellow Natalie Lui ‘22; photo supplied