A company out of New Brunswick plans to improve the outcomes of medical marijuana treatments with its new mobile app. 

Knalysis Technologies creates software that links physicians, providers and patients, offering a global approach to reporting, monitoring and care. This month, the company is releasing its Wellness Tracker App to the public. The app helps patients and their physicians track their use to find out which exact strain of cannabis treats their specific symptoms.

Knalysis CEO Paul Methot says they originally built the app at the request of Marijuana for Trauma, an organization based out of Oromocto that helps veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic pain or other medical conditions. At the time, Methot and Knalysis CTO Richard Vincent Bennett were working at their own software company Pragmatic Informatics.

“They at one point said ‘we want to do a PTSD study, but we have no way to track the data for it. Can you help us out?’ So we built them this tool and it turns out everyone fell in love with the thing. We’ve just been growing it and formed a whole company around it in the end.”

Marijuana for Trauma has been using the app for a while now, but Methot says they decided to broaden the app’s offerings to include more symptoms and conditions. It will now include 54 ailments that you can treat with medical marijuana.

Knalysis Wellness Tracker dashboard.
Image: Submitted

“The app helps us figure out the efficacy of strains in treating those symptoms. Right now, that data is not on the market at all,” says Methot. “If you have cancer or MS or autism and you go to a doctor and they say ‘I can prescribe you cannabis for this,’ no one knows which strains actually help which symptoms. There are no real studies you can point to out there right now for it. We are in the business of tracking the efficacy of strains for symptoms of strains.”

The Knalysis Wellness Tracker app helps patients track their progress with their doctor to help decide what exact kind of marijuana is right for their symptoms. Methot says this data can also help licensed growers and suppliers through the Analytics Web Portal.

“It’s for them to figure out if their strains are actually treating anything. They would give this to all their users and all their clients and then they can track the big picture data to see [which strains work for what] and they can start tweaking their recipes a little better,” he says. “That makes both ends of the spectrum more in line with actually helping people than just darts in the dark.”

The attitude towards medical marijuana has changed radically of late. Though it’s now widely accepted as a legitimate form of treatment, many doctors, especially those in the United States, are still hesitant to prescribe due to lack of data. Methot hopes their Wellness Tracker and other products can help with that.

“We’re finding some of the states are hesitant about medical marijuana being legal because there is no data to back it up. Not just the doctors, but the FDA, government bodies, policy writers, everybody wants more evidence. It’s not enough that everybody is saying ‘make it legal.’ They want evidence,” he says.

“At the end of the day, everyone wants to know the same thing. What strain helps fix or alleviate which symptoms and that’s basically what we’re doing here with all this technology.”

Methot says their products have caught they eye of investors and companies both in Canada and the U.S. Last month, Canada House Wellness Group, the company that owns Marijuana for Trauma, acquired Knalysis by way of a stock exchange with 5 million shares of the company. This means Knalysis now has a bigger budget to develop their products and grow their team.

“We were growing it organically and funding it ourselves, but now that we have a big parent company backing us, we have the whole support of the organization. They have a lot of knowledge on marijuana. they have a lot of relationships we can go on and we can leverage as well,” says Methot.

Long-term, Knalysis would like to grow their products enough to be able to release useful and reliable data to the industry.

“[We want to] get more data, more information and expand it so we can actually do industry reports. We want to be able to take 100 of our potential clients and do an anonymized version of the data on a big level and start publishing our own white papers and industry reports to get that information disseminated,” says Methot.

“At the end of the day, the focus is on the data and we want a lot of it and we want to do a lot of things with it. We want a lot of people to see and use that data as well so the industry as a whole can grow.”

The Knalysis Wellness Tracker app will be released for both Android and iPhone this month.