Neurodiversity-informed design

A tool that processes health information the way I do.

This is the most personal page on this site. It explains why AuVentures exists — not as a product description, but as something I needed and could not find.

Why I built this

I am autistic, and I live with autoimmune illness. I hold my own medical history in memory — every test, every result, every symptom. I can recite my health journey from memory, in order. And I tend to see the patterns in my own data before my doctors do.

That is not a complaint about my doctors. It is a description of a mismatch. The standard medical encounter was not built for someone who processes their health the way I do — and it failed me in two specific ways.

The first is the question I was always being asked: how do you feel? For me, that question has never mapped cleanly onto anything I can answer well. I had to learn, deliberately, how to communicate with a doctor who wanted a feeling when what I had was data — a trend, a result, a pattern, an observation.

The second is that there was no real channel for the pattern recognition I was already doing. I would arrive having seen something in my own history, and the encounter had no good way to receive it. The thing I was best at — knowing my own data — had nowhere to go.

I wanted a tool that put the focus where I actually live: the latest result, the trend, the pattern I am seeing, and what it means for my health.

So I built one. AuVentures began as the tool I needed — a place where I could, in a real sense, talk to my own data, and then bring what I found to my doctors in a form they could see and use.

What AI made possible

A tool that learned to think the way I think.

For all the legitimate concern about AI, modern AI systems introduced one genuinely valuable capability: adaptive communication. A system can learn how a particular person processes information, and meet them there.

That is the capability AuVentures is built around. For the first time, I have a tool that communicates the way I think — because it learned to. It does not ask me to translate myself into a format that was designed for someone else. It works in trends and patterns and results, the way I do.

This is what we mean by neurodiversity-informed design. It is not a visual style or an accessibility checklist. It is a tool whose underlying way of organizing and communicating health information is shaped around how a neurodivergent person actually processes it.

Who this is for

Built for people who understand their health differently.

My experience is my own, and autism is a spectrum — not every autistic person relates to their health, or to questions about feeling, the way I do. But the underlying pattern is widely shared. Many autistic and ADHD people process, organize, and understand their own health information differently than their clinicians do. They notice different things. They hold detail differently. They experience the encounter differently.

Until now, there has not been a health tool designed around that difference — one that treats a neurodivergent person’s way of processing their health as the thing to build for, rather than an exception to accommodate.

If you have ever known something about your own health that the appointment had no way to hear — this was built for you.

That is who AuVentures is for. Not only, but firstly. The work began with autistic and ADHD patients because that is the experience I know from the inside, and because it is an experience the existing system serves least well.

— Christine

More about my background and the path to founding AuVentures is on the founder page.

If this is you

We would genuinely like to hear from you.

AuVentures is being built with the input of the people it is for. If you are autistic or ADHD and you understand your health differently than your clinicians do, your experience can shape this work directly.

Share your perspective, or tell us what a tool like this would need to do for you: feedback@auventureshealth.org. To follow the work or join the July beta, the For Patients & Families page has the details.