AI Psoriasis App: Manage and C (beat-psoriasis)

The AI Psoriasis App: Manage and C (beat-psoriasis) allows you to monitor your psoriasis symptoms and record your psoriasis medicines/treatments taken. In order to analyse your symptoms, the app requires you to upload a photo of the affected area, which is analysed by artificial intelligence (AI) for assessment of severity (note this may not be accurate), as well as asking for your itching and pain levels. It then provides graphs to try to correlate your psoriasis severity and symptoms to the treatments used, as well as environmental factors, eg air quality and pollen. The graphs are quite difficult to interpret, and there's no diary of photos uploaded to allow your and your healthcare provider to track visual progress of symptoms over time.

For the complete app description, go to Google Play(external link), or for a more detailed review, see reviews below.

Clinical review

Reviewer: Emma Riddell, Clinical Pharmacist, Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora
Date of review: April 2024
Platform: Android
Version: 1.4
Comments: I would not recommend using this app to monitor your psoriasis symptoms. The information provided by the app is AI generated and often not relevant or from unreliable sources. The AI generated psoriasis severity assessment is based solely on an AI analysis of an uploaded photo and is not always accurate. You can't log any symptoms without first uploading a photo, so this may be a limiting feature for users who don't always feel comfortable taking a photo or uploading it.
The app produces a graph to track psoriasis symptoms over time. It also produces graphs to correlate symptoms over time with medicines and products used, and environmental conditions. However, as the severity score is not accurate, any graphs produced must be interpreted with caution, and they are quite difficult to interpret.
The app also records a few basic symptoms (score of 1 to 10 for itching and pain) and allows you to complete a self-assessed PASI score, which is a tool used to measure severity and extent of psoriasis. When completed accurately, the PASI score can be a very useful tool to monitor psoriasis, however the app provides no advice on how to use the scoring system. I would recommend users discuss this tool with a healthcare provider for advice before using it to monitor their psoriasis.
The app allows you to track any medicines or products used for managing your psoriasis, however the app is aimed at US users, so many of the listed medicines and products are not available in New Zealand. There is an option to manually add in each medicine and product that you use, however this might be time consuming. Once you have added each treatment, it does get saved, so in future you only need to tick a button to say you have used it.
Overall, the content of this app is not of high quality, and is not produced by specialists in psoriasis.
Safety concerns: Yes. The information provided by this app is via artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the “Q&A” section of the app will search 3 different “locations” for information on the chosen topic – “research papers”, “user comments”, and “web result”. The research papers linked are not always directly relevant to the Q&A topic chosen – for example, in the Q&A section for “what is psoriasis”, the top research papers linked are “peristomal psoriasis”, “predictors of hospital readmission in US adults with psoriasis”, and “concepts in psoriasis: psoriasis and the extracellular matrix”. The “web results” section will just link the top results from google if you search for the chosen topic, so may link to websites with poor quality information. It is unclear where the ”user comments” comes from, as there is no option to add a comment as a user.
Photos uploaded are assessed by AI for “psoriasis severity”, however this analysis is not very accurate.
There is an option to complete a PASI score assessment, however there is no explanation for how to score each section, so this is likely to completed inaccurately by users.
New Zealand relevance: This app uses brand names for medicines and skincare products / topical treatments, many of which are not available in New Zealand. There is an option to manually add your own medications.