Empowering Chronic Pain Management – Nanbar’s Journey Begins!

✍️ Welcome to the First Issue of the Nanbar Monthly Newsletter!

Dear Nanbar Community,

We’re excited to bring you the very first edition of the Nanbar Monthly Newsletter, a space dedicated to sharing our journey, breakthroughs, and insights as we strive to revolutionize chronic pain management. Whether you’re a patient, healthcare provider, researcher, or supporter, we’re thrilled to have you with us on this path of resilience and innovation.

In each issue, we’ll highlight the progress we’re making across projects, introduce you to the inspiring partners and researchers we collaborate with, and keep you updated on the latest developments. Our goal is to make this newsletter a reflection of our mission and a source of connection for everyone invested in better health outcomes for people living with chronic pain.

Thank you for being part of the Nanbar family – let’s make a difference together!

🌟 New Year, New Me

Hi Nanbar Family!

Our end-of-year research & development phase is in full swing, and we wanted to share some exciting updates and behind-the-scenes progress as we get ready for our release in the new year:

✨ New Year, New Look

Three years ago, we built a remote-monitoring mobile app. In those three years, we’ve received a ton of feedback, feature requests, and fresh perspectives from our community. What began as a “simple” survey app has evolved tremendously and outgrown its cozy little shell, so it’s time for a redesign. We’re rolling out a whole new look to make the app more intuitive and visually engaging, with a huge focus on dynamic features and allowing participants to shape their own remote-monitoring experience.

🏃 Android Users, We’re On Our Way!

Many of you have expressed interest in Android support, and we’re excited to announce that our app will soon be available on both iOS and Android devices! 🎊 As we revamp the app, we’ll be transitioning to React Native, a flexible, cross-platform framework that allows us to develop for both systems while keeping the quality and functionality you expect. Why the change? Well, our CTO, Liz, has been patiently (read: threateningly) requesting that we go cross-platform and let her stop coding in Swift (Apple’s proprietary coding language) for a while now. Something about less work overall, faster updates, and a more unified user experience? Developers, am I right? Anyway, here’s to new beginnings, a happier Liz, and making remote-monitoring more accessible than ever – 2025, here we come! 

🗳️ We Need Your Feedback!

As part of our redesign launch, we’d love for you to help us shape the experience. Your input on the design, usability, and any features you’d like to see will be invaluable! Please take a moment to share your thoughts in our Google Forms survey. Every response helps us build a better app for everyone. 

Thank you for being such an incredible part of our journey. This wouldn’t be possible without your support and feedback. Let’s keep building the Nanbar family together! 🌵

🚅 Projects in Motion

😴 Dream On: Unlocking the Secrets of Sleep

It’s pretty well known that one of the most important components of health and well-being is sleep. This is even more relevant for patients with cancer, who experience significantly higher rates of insomnia and poor sleep quality during and after treatment. However, clinicians don’t really know who is likely to develop issues with sleep, and also don’t have a lot of tools to help patients prevent or manage problems. At the ASPHO conference last year, we met Dr. Eric Zhou, a sleep specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital who investigates sleep patterns in patients with cancer and is working to develop strategies to improve sleep quality. Now, we are collaborating with him and his team to identify factors that predispose sleep disturbances for children undergoing cancer treatment.  

💡 A Toast to Recovery

It is estimated that almost 80% of individuals living with a substance use disorder will relapse. This is often due to lack of social support, genetics, and income - the list continues. Nanbar Health’s technologies and predictive capabilities can be immensely helpful to furthering progress in the realm of substance use disorders. The Nanbar team has begun collaborating with Dr. Sasha Deutsch-Link at UNC Chapel Hill to gain deeper insights on patients living with substance use disorder, specifically alcohol use disorder. Dr. Deutsch-Link is a hepatologist by training, with specific research interests in alcohol use disorder and alcohol related liver disease. Our main goals during this collaboration is to better understand disease progression of AUD and support behavioral changes through nudges or cues as a way of maintaining sobriety and progressing towards a healthier lifestyle.

🔃 ✨ Embracing Failure, Inspiring Progress

Last week our team received the unfortunate news that we did not proceed to the finalist round of the NC IDEA Seed grant. 

Although it may feel like a significant setback right now, it's essential to take a step back and recognize the incredible progress our team has made over the past year. This year, Nanbar was one of only 20 companies chosen as a semifinalist, standing out among 147 applicants in the highly competitive first round of the grant process. In contrast, just one year ago, Nanbar didn’t make it past the initial round. We have worked so hard, and this is a testament to our work. 

The idea behind Nanbar is new, in fact, I do not even know if we as a team completely understand what Nanbar is - or what its going to be about. 

Every time that we don’t win a grant, lose a possible partnership, or fail to move in the direction we thought we were supposed to, we take our time to reflect, and decide what we are doing next. We try our best to be resilient. 

For those who have been wondering why our logo is a cactus it’s because our team focuses on the idea of resilience. Cacti can live with very little water; sometimes in freezing temperatures it has its own protection, stored with water and healthy fats to ensure a long life. They haven’t changed much from the prehistoric times, seemingly able to adapt to the world around them. 

So Nanbar Health is just that - resilient.

We will be resubmitting our SBIR innovation grant for use and alcohol use disorder with a new collaborator at UNC Chapel Hill that you can read about down below. In addition, we will be submitting a phase 2 SBIR from the HEAL initiative for work in chronic pain. 

Failure stinks, its not what anyone ever wants to see happen, but it is necessary. Every time we fail, we grow. And we will continue to grow - slowly, but surely. 

And it’s not all bad, 10 incredible small businesses throughout the state of North Carolina have become finalists for the NC IDEA grant. For those reading this newsletter, please support small businesses and we encourage you to support these.

🔍️ 💊 Review of Medication 

As part of our upcoming Nanbar 2.0 release in the new year, we’re rolling out a very highly requested feature: Medication Tracking! Soon, users will be able to easily track their medications and receive timely reminders to help them stay on schedule. 

We thought we’d take you behind the scenes of our design process and how we built this feature, from rough sketches and brainstorming, to polished designs, and finally gathering community feedback. Thanks to all of you who weighed in with suggestions and helped us refine this design into something more intuitive, accessible, and user-friendly.

✏️ It All Starts with a Sketch

You don’t need fancy software to start designing software. Everything starts with an idea. For us, that idea often begins as a very rough sketch on paper. It’s not about making things perfect, just getting the main ideas down. Our core goals for the Medication Tracker were daily reminders, dosage tracking, and ways for participants to visualize their progress and medication status. 

🎨 From Sketch to Figma: Turning Doodles into Designs

Once we had a sketch, we took to Figma to make it look more like … well, an actual app. We came up with a few different designs, tested out some ideas, and decided on a layout that was clean, simple, and modular. We added elements like cards to display information, checkboxes to mark off doses, data visuals to track medication intake, and gamification elements to keep things interesting and motivate participants along the way.

💬 Community-Driven Design

As we developed the Medication Tracker, we wanted to make sure we were gathering as much feedback as possible. Once we had created three solid design ideas in Figma, we reached out to our community and ran LinkedIn polls to gather your thoughts. Your responses and feedback were incredibly helpful and gave us insights into what makes a design intuitive and truly useful. Overwhelmingly, people gravitate to one design over the other two, praising its simplicity and its use of color to quickly communicate key information. Interestingly, it was the first design we made – maybe there’s something to be said for first instincts? 

Thanks again to everyone who shared their thoughts! Feedback helps us create better, more accessible, and more user-friendly tools. Together, we can shape the technology making a difference in people’s lives.🌵

Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for all of your support!

📚️ American Society of Hematologist Publications 

📲 How to Lose an App in 10 Days 

We’ve proven that the Nanbar Health application is capable of predicting pain scores and people living with sickle cell disease. One very large & common issue in digital health is that people don’t necessarily want to engage. With the number of health apps in the marketplace, engagement with our tool is rough. People drop off relatively quickly and maybe that’s because right now the Nanbar Health app feels like an obligation and not necessarily a desire. Our team is working on solving that first - engagement & perceived benefit. We can’t give out all the details of our new abstract just yet, but there are design choices, user experience features, and perceived benefit opportunities that we have identified and are actively working on implementing and testing out. Be on the lookout for our new publication on digital health engagement!

🏥 Exploring Hospital Readmission Patterns in Sickle Cell Patients Using mHealth Data

Our team, in collaboration with an amazing team of providers and researchers at Duke University, evaluated the coalescing of signs and symptoms comparatively for sickle cell patients who had 30-day readmissions and those who were not re-admitted. Using network analysis applied to physiologic and pain data collected via the Nanbar Health app from patients with SCD, we were able to identify differences in both the patterns of associations and the expected influence of the measured variables across these groups of patients readmitted and note readmitted.

Overall, our analyses and findings offer a unique way to help understand patterns that may result in readmission for patients with SCD; further research is needed to validate these findings in a larger cohort and explore the utility of this technique in supporting early diagnosis, proactivity, and intervention. Keep your eyes peeled for this new publication!

🫀 Cardiology Publications

❤️ The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants

Aortic dissection is a possibly life-threatening emergency situation for patients experiencing them. After an aortic dissection repair, patients frequently feel like they can’t live the life that they lived before. Physiologically, they shouldn’t feel any symptoms. This should make sense given that the heart is repaired, but patients still report psychological concerns alongside pain. Strangely, the location of repair doesn't really correlate with the area that they’re experiencing pain and other symptoms. To investigate this, we worked with ECU’s (East Carolina University) Heart Center to better understand the relationship between psychological symptoms in patients living with aortic dissection repairs or aneurysms. Sadly, our study was cut short, but we were able to enroll one remarkable individual and wanted to show off the hard work that they did over 3 months of recovery with the help of Nanbar Health. Stay tuned for our publication on the work that we did with ECU!

🤝 Gratitude and Next Steps

As we wrap up our first issue, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has supported Nanbar Health along the way. From the clinicians and researchers who collaborate with us, to each member of our community who shares in our mission, thank you for believing in the power of resilience, innovation, and hope.

While we’ve faced challenges and experienced setbacks, each step forward—big or small—reinforces our commitment to transform chronic pain management. Your support inspires us to keep evolving, learning, and improving. We’re excited about the road ahead and look forward to sharing our journey with you.

In the coming months, we’ll be focusing on refining our technology to create a more engaging experience, strengthening collaborations with new partners, and expanding our research. Together, we will continue to work toward a future where everyone facing chronic pain and complex health challenges can find personalized, proactive care and support.

Thank you for being part of the Nanbar family. Stay tuned, stay resilient, and let’s make a difference—together.

With gratitude,

🌵 Team Nanbar