How it works,
and how your privacy is kept.

The point of this is simple: you get a heads-up about trends in your own health before they slip past you. Here is how that happens.

Pattern detection runs first, and it is straight math — not the AI. More than fifty detectors look at the data you log and check for things you would have to be watching closely to catch: a jump in how often a symptom shows up, a slow creep in severity, an "afternoons are worse" cluster, a brand-new symptom, a dip in keeping up with your Medications, or a win worth celebrating. Because every detector is math, the reason behind any insight can always be traced back to the numbers.

Once a pattern is found, the AI turns it into a sentence you can read at a glance — "Fatigue is up 48% this week, mostly in the afternoons" instead of raw figures. The AI runs right on your iPhone using Apple's built-in models. Your notes, food names, and voice transcripts never leave the device for an outside service. There are no per-use fees, and nothing for an outside company to read.

The text streams in sentence by sentence, so you are not watching a blank screen while it thinks. The AI writes in a few different styles for the places it shows up — home cards, Symptoms detail, Visit Prep, and a day-at-a-glance summary — so each one reads the way that screen needs it to.

These limits exist so you can trust what you read: the AI shows you what is happening, and the medical calls stay with you and your doctor.

It observes, you and your doctor decide. We did not want a chatbot that pretends to know medicine. We wanted a quiet helper that surfaces patterns and leaves the deciding to the people in the room.

It never prescribes. The AI is instructed not to suggest treatments, name causes, or tell you what to do. Every line is an observation. Advice-style words like "should", "try", "consider", and "diagnose" are stripped out after the text is written.

The output is cleaned before it reaches you. Every response is checked first: advice phrasing is removed, web links are taken out, and the length is capped. So even if a stray link slips into a Symptoms note, it can never reach you as something clickable.

It asks you to agree first. Before the AI features turn on, you accept a short note that says it straight: Valeska helps you organize your own health info — it is not a substitute for medical advice. The same note rides along on your Visit Prep export.

It works even on older iPhones. If a phone can't run the AI on the device itself, Valeska falls back to ready-made wording. The feature still works — it just reads a little more plainly. No one is locked out for having last year's phone.

The payoff here is peace of mind: your health history lives with you, not on someone else's server, and you hold the keys. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Kept on your device by default. Everything you log — Symptoms, Medications and doses, Nutrition, Water, Mood, Documents, and vitals — is saved in a private, locked store on your phone. Syncing to the cloud is a separate feature you turn on yourself; it is off until you ask for it.

Locked when your phone is locked. The store on your device is encrypted with a key held in your iPhone's secure hardware and guarded by your passcode. Lose the phone and the data can't be read. Delete the app and the key is destroyed with it.

Sharing stays scoped. If you invite a caregiver, the limits you set are enforced down at the data layer, not just in the buttons you see. A caregiver can't reach anything you didn't grant them, and when you turn off access it ends right away.

No health info in error reports. When something crashes, the report we receive carries only technical details. It deliberately leaves out the contents of your records, screenshots, and on-screen text. We can fix bugs without your private info ever tagging along.

Take it or delete it, anytime. Every part of the app can be exported, and Visit Prep makes a doctor-ready PDF on demand. Deleting your account wipes the copy on your device, the cloud copy if sync was ever on, and every stored key — one tap, no support ticket.

Sync is here for when one device isn't enough — so your health info can keep up with how you actually live. It covers two situations: you have two devices (say an iPhone and an iPad) and want the same info on both, or a caregiver uses their own device to view or help with a shared profile. It is not there to mine your data. It is off by default and is part of the Pro plan.

If you drop back to the free plan, sync simply stops. Reinstalling without sync gives you a fresh start, with nothing pulled back from a server. Any info already in the cloud stays in your account until you choose to delete it, which you can do from Settings. You only ever see rows that are yours or that were shared with you.

We are not a hospital or insurer, and we don't pretend to be. HIPAA, the U.S. health-privacy law, may not bind a personal app like ours. But we built Valeska the way those rules would expect if it did: encrypted storage, access limited to what was granted, a record of sensitive changes, collecting only what's needed, and a delete button that truly deletes. People living with a chronic condition deserve that standard whether or not the law requires it.

What we do:

We lock all stored health info with a key unique to your device. We protect anything in transit between server and device. We enforce who-can-see-what at the data layer, not just in the app. We keep a log of every change a caregiver makes. We strip health info out of crash and performance reports. And we give you one-tap account deletion that clears your device, the cloud, and every stored key.

What we don't do:

We never sell, rent, or share your data — with anyone. We never send your health info to an outside AI or analytics service. We don't embed ad trackers. We don't read, claim to read, or replace your doctor's advice. And we won't hold your data hostage if you stop paying.

Valeska is a tool. A doctor is a doctor. The app helps you see what you've been logging and bring a tidy summary to your next visit. It is not a diagnosis tool, not a clinical decision system, and not a replacement for professional care. Everything the AI shows is an observation only — it never recommends, prescribes, or advises.

You accept this note before the AI features turn on. The export PDFs carry it in the footer, and the Visit Prep header tells your doctor what they're looking at.

For emergencies, call 911 or your local emergency number. Don't open an app first.