How Our Technology Works
Everything you see on neurobetter — from the Advice Hub to the tools we are building — is developed in-house by our team. We do not use off-the-shelf website builders or third-party platforms for our core services.
This is a deliberate choice. When you are building technology that handles sensitive topics like mental health, you need full control over how it works, how data is handled, and how people experience it.
Built from the ground up
neurobetter is built using Ruby on Rails, a well-established web framework used by organisations around the world. We chose it for its maturity, security features, and the strength of its developer community.
Our content management system, Panda CMS, is an open-source project that we maintain and contribute to. It gives us the flexibility to build features that are specific to our needs — like our callout system for highlighting safety information, our footnote system for citing research, and our structured content tools.
What does “in-house” mean?
It means our team writes the code, designs the interfaces, and makes the technical decisions. We are not reselling or repackaging someone else’s product. This gives us full control over quality, privacy and accessibility.
Open-source contributions
We believe in giving back to the communities that support us. Several of the tools we build and use are open-source, meaning other organisations can use, improve and learn from them.
Our content management system and related tools are publicly available and actively maintained. We contribute fixes, features and documentation to the projects we depend on, and we share our own work where it might help others.
Open source is not just a technical decision — it reflects our values of transparency, collaboration and shared knowledge.
Privacy and security by design
Privacy is not something we add on afterwards. It is built into how we design and develop everything.
Our approach follows the principle of privacy by design — meaning we consider data protection at every stage of development, not just at the end. This includes thinking carefully about what data we collect, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and who can access it.
Key aspects of our approach include:
- collecting only the data we genuinely need
- encrypting data both in transit and at rest
- limiting access to personal data on a need-to-know basis
- regular security reviews and updates
- following UK data protection law (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018
Privacy by design
The concept of privacy by design was developed by Dr Ann Cavoukian and is now embedded in UK and EU data protection law. It requires organisations to consider privacy at the design stage of any system, process or product.
How our data architecture works
We take a careful approach to how data flows through our systems. Our architecture is designed to keep things simple, secure and maintainable.
We use a relational database structure, which means data is organised in a clear, well-defined way. This makes it easier to ensure data integrity, run security checks, and respond to data subject access requests under UK GDPR.
We avoid unnecessary complexity. Where possible, we use proven, well-understood approaches rather than chasing the latest technology trends. This makes our systems more reliable and easier to maintain over the long term.
Hosting and infrastructure
Our services are hosted on established, reputable cloud infrastructure providers. We choose providers that offer strong security credentials, UK or European data centres, and compliance with relevant data protection standards.
We use automated deployment processes to reduce the risk of human error when updating our services, and we maintain separate environments for development, testing and production to ensure changes are thoroughly tested before they reach our users.
We take this seriously
We know that trust matters — especially when it comes to mental health. Our technology choices are guided by the same values that guide our content: care, transparency and responsibility.