I initially thought that you and Mom invented this diabetes to control me.
— A founder’s son, on diagnosis day
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (spoken by the fox)
DiaHeroes builds clinically-grounded mobile companions for children with chronic disease. We start with type 1 diabetes — the hardest case, and personal to two of three founders, who are parents of T1D kids — and we’ve built the architecture to extend to type 2 diabetes, childhood obesity, asthma, epilepsy, and pediatric oncology. A small fox named Foxy keeps the daily routine bearable.
A child with a chronic condition lives in a world where forgetting lunch is not a small thing. A companion that does not register the asymmetry between “forgot lunch” and “had a great lunch” is a companion that has nothing to teach.
— From the design account
● Live build · iter 13
Children living with chronic conditions face routines that do not negotiate. For a child with type 1 diabetes that means up to twenty events a day — meals, glucose measurements, insulin timing, exercise, sleep — all on a schedule the disease imposes and the child must keep. For a child with asthma, epilepsy, or in oncology treatment, the structure is different but the shape is the same.
The medical evidence is unambiguous: adherence is the dominant lever for long-term outcome, and adolescence is where it most often breaks down. The clinical literature is full of interventions that work in the clinic and fail at home.
The reason is not that children don’t care. The reason is that the routine is unfair, and existing tools either pretend it isn’t — cheerful gamification that wears off — or punish the child for slipping, producing apps the child stops opening. Neither holds.
DiaHeroes is the third option: a companion that names what is unfair, holds the line anyway, and stays warm on the bad day.
Living with a chronic condition is, structurally, an exercise in holding a contradiction every day. The body wants what the condition forbids. Pediatric care recognizes three modes a child can settle into. Our companions are built around the third — and because the framework is about the structure of the contradiction, not the specifics of one disease, it travels.
The kid pretends the condition isn’t there. Eats whatever, hides from consequences, skips medications. Well-documented in adolescence; precedes the worst medical outcomes. Cheerful gamification reinforces this mode.
The kid acknowledges everything cynically, complies grudgingly. Develops the depression and disengagement clinicians fear. Punishing or scolding tools reinforce this mode.
Yes, this is unfair. Yes, I have to take the medication / measure / pace myself anyway. Both true. Held without collapse. The child remains agent of their own care. This is what’s associated with strong long-term outcomes.
The structural problem we solve is not specific to glucose. It’s the problem of a child living with an unfair routine that does not negotiate, where adherence is the dominant outcome lever and where existing tools fail by being either saccharine or stern.
That problem appears, with the same shape, across pediatric chronic disease. We start with type 1 diabetes because it is the hardest case — densest schedule, most unforgiving consequences — and because two of three founders live it as parents. T1D-first is evidence of capability, not the ceiling.
The architecture — the framework, the asymmetric correction, the structured memory, the principled tone — is condition-agnostic. The product roadmap is condition expansion, not feature expansion.
Up to twenty events, end-of-day reflection, and a small fox whose mood tracks the day. Below is a representative T1D day — not a marketing scenario. Real schedule, real prompt structure.
Behind the fox: a measurable adherence model, durable per-child memory, structured prompt architecture, and clinical-safety constraints. Each piece earns its place by addressing a specific failure mode that an off-the-shelf LLM would otherwise produce.
The health score recovers faster than it declines. The cost of a bad day is real; the recovery from one is also real, and faster. Encoded as math, not as language — and tunable per condition.
Each session writes a bounded structured summary: topics, facts covered, engagement signal, behavioral correction. The fox remembers what mattered without retaining what shouldn’t persist. Fully anonymized.
A child who talked about ships yesterday is asked, today, whether they’d like to continue. Determinism creates ritual; ritual creates the perceived continuity that makes a character feel real.
Every goodnight is paired: a descriptive note about the day’s trajectory plus an emotional beat. Tone is calibrated by the health trajectory and clinically reviewed. Foxy’s voice is principled, not improvised.
No names, no medical numbers, no identifiable details persist anywhere. Conversations are logged for offline analysis; durable memory is the structured summary. Designed to clear pediatric data-protection bars from day one.
English, Russian, Hebrew. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech localized; Foxy’s voice and persona consistent across languages. Trial sites in multiple geographies.
The fox is the friend who says: this is hard and unfair, AND we measure anyway, AND we get a tale after, AND tomorrow is a new day. Foxy holds the tension.
— From DiaHeroes ethics summary
Most companion apps are designed by tone preference. DiaHeroes is designed from a written framework that connects pediatric medicine, developmental psychology (Kohlberg), and a particular philosophical claim: that moral seriousness is the work of staying with a contradiction one cannot resolve.
That framework is not decoration. It generates the design choices: the asymmetric scoring, the calibrated end-of-day messaging, the structured memory, the refusal to gamify or to scold. Every parameter is defensible from the framework, and revisable if the framework changes. And because the framework is condition-agnostic, the same posture extends naturally to T2D, obesity, asthma, epilepsy, and oncology.
This matters for clinical partners, for regulators, and for parents: we can answer the question “why is the app shaped this way?” with more than “it tested well.” The shape follows from a position that has been written down and can be examined.
Request the design account →Two questions any pediatric AI product must answer plainly: how is the child’s identity protected, and how is the model kept on age-appropriate ground? Below, the position in plain language; the formal policy text follows each.
Registration is anonymous from the first tap. A child signs up without name, email, phone, or any other identifier. Each user is identified internally by a six-digit code and a four-digit password — that is the entire account. All data on our servers is stored against that code and nothing else.
When physiological data flows into the system — for example, glucose readings or HbA1c — it is conveyed by the patient’s clinician, within the existing clinical relationship, using only the six-digit code. We never receive the patient’s name, contact details, or any other identifier through that channel.
The one place this calculus changes is direct CGM integration. Logging into a CGM data store will, by the nature of those systems, require personally identifying credentials. When we ship that integration we will treat it as a regulated data path and comply with the applicable laws and standards explicitly — not retrofit them.
Currently, user registration and use of the app are completely anonymous. Users register without providing personal information and are then identified by a 6-digit code and a 4-digit password. All user information is stored on our servers only under this number. We do not ask users to provide contact information, names, or other personal information.
As to personal information required to get access to a patient’s CGM data, the access to this data is performed by the patient’s doctor within the framework of usual clinical practice. When conveying information about physiological data (glucose levels, glycated hemoglobin and other) to the application owners, the doctor will always use only the 6-digit code of the patient without disclosing any personal data identifying the patient (names, contact information, etc.).
In the future, when integrating with CGM systems, we will require personal information to log in to the CGM data storage system. When this option is implemented, we will ensure compliance with laws and regulations taking this into account.
Letting children aged 5–12 talk to a generative model raises an obvious worry: that the conversation drifts somewhere it shouldn’t, or that a curious child finds a way to push it there. Foxy’s prompt structure encodes the audience explicitly — tone, vocabulary, and topic boundaries are calibrated to the age range and held by the system, not by goodwill.
We also know that some children are creative about jailbreaks, and we treat that as a design problem rather than a hope. Before any patient testing, a dedicated red team is tasked with attempting to subvert Foxy — trying to elicit inappropriate language or topics — and the prompt architecture is hardened in response. The findings feed back into the system before children see it.
The use of artificial intelligence by children and adolescents raises concerns about the possibility of discussing inappropriate topics or using inappropriate language. With this in mind, the AI prompts are designed with a reminder that users are aged 5–12 years old and should adhere to the ethical context and content of communication within the appropriate age range.
However, there are known cases of “creative” children and teenagers learning to “hack” the AI and access inappropriate content. To prevent such cases, before testing the DiaHeroes app on a control group of patients, a team of testers was tasked with attempting to “hack” the AI dialogues and access inappropriate topics or language. The results of this test will be used to refine the prompts to prevent such situations.
If you work with pediatric chronic disease, run a clinic that wants to evaluate the system, or are looking to back work where the philosophical foundation matters as much as the product — let’s talk.