Hi everyone, I am Elizaveta, a researcher and data scientist based in Rotorua.
Over the last six months I have been building me-sage, a conversational food and habit tracker that lives entirely in WhatsApp. No app, no login. It tracks food logs, connects patterns through conversation, checks in on you, and gently supports the goals you set for yourself.
I built it after losing a friend who I think was so caught up in stress and looking after everyone else that she stopped noticing what was going on in her own body. I wanted to build something that helps people study themselves - connect the dots and notice changes earlier. The kind of awareness that a health system often can’t provide, because only we truly know what’s happening inside us day to day.
I am in early testing with my first users, and the engagement has been genuinely surprising. The vision is bigger than food - modular blocks covering sleep, stress, movement, and cycle tracking, building toward community-owned longitudinal health data that could actually inform how we design health systems from the ground up.
I would genuinely love advice from people working in primary care, Māori and Pacific health, or behavior change - what are you seeing on the ground that something like this should know about? What would make it actually useful in your world?