Orphans in the Desert is an online platform that aims to help people with rare diseases by allowing them to input unstructured health data to be analyzed by IBM's Watson for potential diagnoses, and to cluster patients together in order to incentivize treatment research. It serves as a safe place for rare disease patients to describe their symptoms freely without bias or preconceptions, and provides educational resources, support groups, and information on clinical studies. The platform allows for both individual analysis of user data as well as macro-level statistical analysis of particular or general rare diseases.