About Compass

Why Compass exists

An ALS/MND diagnosis arrives with an enormous amount to understand and very little order to it. Good information exists, but it is scattered across clinic handouts, association websites, research summaries, forums and conversations that happen only if someone thinks to raise the topic. People are left to work out for themselves what matters now, what can wait, and what they should be asking about before a decision becomes urgent.

Compass was created to give that material a shape. It organises practical, reviewed information into cards, so it can be read in the order that fits a person's situation rather than the order a website happens to publish it.

For more on how the idea came together, what the ALS/MND community told us, and how Compass grew out of Curalysis, read the story behind Compass.

The problem it addresses

The gap Compass tries to close is one of sequencing and access rather than one of missing facts. Three problems recur:

• Timing. Some information is only useful if it arrives early enough to act on. Voice banking and planning conversations are the clearest examples.
• Fragmentation. Answers live in different places, at different reading levels, with different assumptions about where you live and what care you can reach.
• Practical knowledge going unrecorded. A great deal of what actually helps is learned by people living with ALS/MND and by those caring for them, and it rarely makes it into formal guidance.

Compass is an information resource. It does not give medical advice, it is never personalised to an individual, and it is not a substitute for a care team.

How Compass is built

Content is written as cards. A card covers one area, such as getting set up after a diagnosis or planning for breathing support, and holds the questions people actually ask about it, practical steps, and resources worth reading next.

Every card lives in a versioned file, so each change is recorded and can be traced back. Answers carry their sources. Where a claim rests on a specific source, that source is cited on the answer rather than gathered in a bibliography, and external resources are checked and dated before they are listed.

Publishing runs through a pipeline that only ever releases content which has cleared its checks. Anything still being drafted, anything awaiting the approval described below, and anything whose rights are unresolved is structurally absent from what you can read here rather than merely hidden from view.

The published content is also available as data. See the /v1 API for the artifacts, and Updates for what has changed in each release.

Editorial, clinical and specialist review

Compass separates things that are often blurred together, and shows each one plainly on the card it applies to. Open the review sheet at the top right of any card and it will say where that card stands, in one of these words.

• Not yet editorially reviewed. Nothing editorial has happened to this card yet.
• Waiting for team review. An editorial check has been done. A person on the Compass team has not signed the card off yet.
• Editorially reviewed. A named person on the Compass team has signed the card off.
• Edited since its last review. The card was checked, and some of it has changed since. The review sheet says when the check ran and what it covered. The changed parts have not been checked yet.
• Waiting for clinical review. Recorded separately from the two above. It has not started on any card in this release.

The editorial check behind “Waiting for team review”

Compass is in a pre-launch phase, and most of what you can read now is waiting for team review: it has had an AI editorial check rather than a team one. An AI pass checked each answer against the sources attached to it: whether the source says what the answer says it says, whether the wording claims more than the evidence supports, whether every quotation is genuinely present at the link given, and whether anything reads as personalised medical advice. Where the evidence did not support a statement, the statement was softened, qualified, or left without an evidence marker. Where the subject was one that could cause harm if it were wrong, the threshold was higher and material was withheld rather than published on a weak basis.

An AI editorial check is not a clinical endorsement and it is not a Compass team approval. It is a consistency and attribution check, and it can be wrong in ways a person would catch. That is why a card it has passed reads as waiting for team review rather than as reviewed. The card's review sheet records the date the check ran and the model that ran it.

Team review

Team review is a check by a person on the Compass team that the card is clear, properly structured, correctly attributed, within the purpose of the resource, and not offering personalised medical advice. It is a separate record from the AI editorial check and does not follow automatically from it. Team review is not clinical endorsement, and Compass never presents it as one.

Clinical review

Clinical review is recorded separately and accumulates over time. Each review is shown with the reviewer's role, the area they reviewed, the date, and the version of the card it applied to. For topics where the risk of getting it wrong is high, a clinical review is a condition of publication rather than an addition to it. Elsewhere a card may be published while clinical review is still waiting, and the card says so. No card in this release has had one.

Specialist review

Allied health, palliative care, regional, legal and ethical, accessibility, evidence and lived-experience reviews are recorded in the same way. Reviews are shown as facts about who checked what and when, never as a score or a rating.

More about review, and how to take part.

Lived experience

Practical knowledge from people living with ALS/MND, and from those caring for them, is treated as its own form of expertise rather than as decoration. Tips, workarounds, preparation advice, equipment lessons, questions that turned out to matter and things people wish they had known earlier are attached to the card, question or step they belong to.

Contributions are moderated before they appear. The team may shorten, combine or de-identify them. Where a name or a chosen form of attribution will appear, the final wording is confirmed with the contributor first. Attribution options range from fully anonymous through to a first name or a professional role, and an email address is never displayed.

Every published insight is labelled as lived experience or practical advice. It is never presented as clinical guidance or as medical evidence.

Open licence

Original Compass content, once approved, is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). You may copy it, adapt it and use it commercially, provided you attribute it as "Compass, by Curalysis", link the original page, and mark any changes you make as your own adaptation.

The licence covers only the material Compass owns or is authorised to relicense. It does not extend to clinical guidelines, association material, journal articles, quoted passages or any external resource we link to. Those keep their own terms, and each payload states which licence applies to which part.

Content is general information, not medical advice. That statement travels with the content and should be kept in any reuse.

Compass and Curalysis

Compass is produced and maintained by Curalysis, and is deliberately built as an open resource rather than a product feature. It is free, needs no account, carries an open licence, and is readable and reusable by anyone, including organisations that have nothing to do with Curalysis.

The separation is structural, not just editorial. Compass has its own database and credentials, holds no Curalysis user data, collects no health information about readers, and shares no cookies or identifiers with any Curalysis product. Where a Curalysis tool is genuinely relevant to a card, it may be linked with a clear disclosure, kept visually secondary, and reviewed like any other content change. Such a link is never an eligibility claim or a clinical recommendation.

Visit Curalysis (opens in a new tab)

How to contribute

Anyone can contribute, and no account is needed. Name and email are optional for most contributions.

• Use the feedback controls on the card you are reading. Each answer, the practical steps, the resources, the lived-experience tips and the card as a whole have their own, and each one sends us the exact place you were reading.
• How to participate explains where each kind of feedback belongs and what happens after you send it.
• Review activity shows what you have already proposed.
• Offer to review content in your area of expertise.

We read every contribution. How long a response takes will vary with its complexity and the kind of review it needs, so we do not promise a turnaround time. Safety concerns are prioritised. Compass is not an emergency or clinical support service.

Contributors keep control of their personal details: see the privacy notice and the terms of use, and check on anything you have sent us.