The birth of AffectLog did not begin in a lab.
It began in a clinical diagnostic centre.

My wife, carrying our daughter, was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. Numbers suddenly mattered in a way they never had before: glucose levels, heart rates, risk scores. Each value held the fragile thread of two lives. And yet, these numbers existed like scattered islands — fragmented, hidden, guarded by walls of compliance and fragmented systems. To see them whole, to act on them with clarity, felt impossible.

Around the same time, I tried to access my own mental health data. Data that I had generated through Apple’s sensors, through months of lived experience. To my shock, I had to plead for access. I, the living person whose body created that data, was the last one entitled to see it.

Meanwhile, those very companies ingest hundreds of data points per person per stream every day. Quietly. Invisibly. Without asking. Without explaining.

And as a researcher, I was held to a different reality: every dataset I wanted to collect was reviewed by a new committee each month at Université Paris Cité and INSERM. Every intention was scrutinised. Every word was weighed. What was done out of care and respect was slowed to a crawl, while what was done out of profit raced ahead unchecked.

It struck me with a clarity that felt almost spiritual: it is nearly impossible to study anything meaningful about life that is not personal. And yet, the very systems we live under make the personal untouchable for those who care — and endlessly exploitable for those who don’t.

That was the seed of AffectLog. Not a business idea, but a vow.

A vow that the stories written in our data should not be hoarded in vaults, nor traded like currency, but treated as living expressions of human beings.
A vow that privacy is not about secrecy — it is about dignity.
A vow that compliance is not a checklist — it is compassion made visible.

AffectLog is my way of answering those hospital nights, those locked digital doors, those endless research reviews. It is my way of saying: the personal belongs to the person. And from that truth, a new kind of technology must grow.