Noah Muller

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Beyond the Score: Introducing HPPAP, A Modern Tool for Holistic Pain Management

9/9/2025

Beyond the Score: Introducing HPPAP, A Modern Tool for Holistic Pain Management cover image

Beyond the Score: Introducing HPPAP, A Modern Tool for Holistic Pain Management

Pain is more than just a number on a scale. It’s a complex, personal story that can weave its way into every corner of our lives, affecting our work, our mood, our sleep, and our relationships. For those living with persistent or chronic pain, understanding this story is the first step toward managing it. Yet, the tools available to help us are often clinical, locked behind expensive licenses, or raise valid concerns about data privacy.

This gap is where a new project begins. Today, I'm excited to introduce the Holistic Pain Profile & Action Planner (HPPAP)—a free, open-source, and privacy-first web app designed to empower you in your pain management journey.

Try the HPPAP app now

The "Why": Inspiration and Guiding Principles

The HPPAP project was born from a simple but powerful idea: the best tools for understanding health should be accessible to everyone. While researching comprehensive pain assessment frameworks, it became clear that many of the most thorough tools are proprietary. This creates a barrier, limiting access for individuals, researchers, and smaller clinics without significant budgets.

This sparked a question: What if we could create something just as comprehensive, but build it on a foundation of openness and empowerment?

This led to the four core principles of HPPAP:

  1. Patient Empowerment: To shift the user from being a passive tracker of symptoms to an active planner of their own wellness.
  2. Holistic, Not Just Clinical: To create a tool that recognizes pain’s true impact on mood, sleep, concentration, and daily life.
  3. Privacy by Design: To ensure your sensitive health data remains yours and yours alone. HPPAP is "local-first," meaning everything you enter is stored only in your browser on your device. Nothing is sent to a server.
  4. Open and Collaborative: To build a tool that can grow and improve with community input, not behind closed corporate doors.

A Guided Tour: The HPPAP Journey

HPPAP is not just a form; it's a guided journey through six distinct sections. Each part builds on the last, helping you create a complete, nuanced picture of your pain experience.

  • 1. Pain Snapshot: This captures the immediate "right now"—your current pain intensity, its location on a body diagram, and the words that best describe it (e.g., aching, sharp, burning).
  • 2. Pain Patterns & Triggers: Here, you look at the bigger picture over the past week. You'll identify your average, best, and worst pain levels, and reflect on what activities or times of day make your pain better or worse.
  • 3. Impact on Daily Life: This section quantifies the real-world consequences of pain, measuring its interference with everything from physical tasks and sleep to mood and social activities.
  • 4. Emotional Well-being & Pain: Pain isn't just a physical sensation. This section acknowledges the crucial link between pain and mental health, exploring feelings like frustration, anxiety, and hope.
  • 5. Coping & Management Strategies: Here, you can reflect on what you're already doing to manage your pain—from medications to mindfulness—and how effective those strategies feel to you.
  • 6. Personal Goals & Action Planning: This is what truly sets HPPAP apart. The final section turns your assessment into action. It helps you identify the one area most impacted by pain and set a small, achievable goal for the week ahead, turning insight into a concrete plan.

At the end of the journey, HPPAP generates a Summary Report. This clean, organized document is a powerful tool for self-reflection and can be saved or printed to facilitate clearer, more productive conversations with your doctor, physical therapist, or other healthcare providers.

Under the Hood: The Technology Choices

To bring HPPAP to life, I chose a modern, fast, and secure tech stack:

  • React 19 and TypeScript: This combination allows for a robust, interactive, and error-free user interface.
  • Vite: Behind the scenes, Vite provides a lightning-fast development experience, making it easier to build and update the app.

The Future is Open: Get Involved!

HPPAP is a living project, and its launch is just the beginning. The vision is to build a suite of features that can grow with the community's needs, such as historical data tracking and visualizations, translations into more languages, and user-suggested modules.

This is where you come in. As an open-source project, its future is collaborative.

  • Try the app: Visit https://masterno.github.io/HPPAP/ and walk through the assessment.
  • Give feedback: Have an idea or find a bug? Let us know. Your experience as a user is invaluable.
  • Contribute on GitHub: For developers, researchers, or clinicians, the code is open for you to inspect, audit, and improve. Check out the project at https://github.com/masterno/HPPAP.

A Tool for a Better Conversation

HPPAP is more than just an app. It's an experiment in creating better health tools—tools that are open, private, and empowering. It’s designed to help you find the patterns in your pain, celebrate your progress, and build a plan for a better-feeling future.

It's a tool to help you have a better conversation, not only with your doctor, but with yourself.