Better Mental Health Now!

Better Mental Health Now is a powerful depression and anxiety relief app that allows users to personalize and maximize the scientifically-proven power of physical activity, breath and meditation to decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety and improve focus, memory and sleep in as little as 10 minutes a day.

More than 600 million people across the globe suffer from depression or anxiety.  The most common treatments are anti-depressants and behavior-based therapies. The problem is that that these interventions are not effective for the majority of people suffering with these debilitating diagnoses and both have cost and availability barriers that limit their usefulness. Better Mental Health Now! provides a scientifically-validated and novel treatment approach that is affordable, widely accessible and designed to be easily and seamlessly integrated into the daily habits of people who suffer with depression and anxiety with short, fun activities involving physical activity, breathing or meditation.   

Our theory of change is based on consensus in the scientific literature showing that physical activity can be as effective as anti-depressants to treat major depressive disorder and other studies showing the effectiveness of breathing and meditation in treating depression and anxiety.  Better Mental Health Now! is revolutionary in its combination of short, engaging, guided activities that focus users on the immediate effects of these activities on mood and for our analytics that will reveal new data about specific interventions that are maximally effective for the wide range of clients that will use it: on/off meds; mild, moderate severe cases.  

Target outcomes include: (1) for individuals we estimate that well over 50% of our users will report regular mood boosts that maintain or improve over time; (2) for digital health research we predict that the first 12 months of data will provide novel insight into the most effective interventions to improve mood and decrease anxiety in particular patient populations (age, gender, severity level) that can then be used to leverage more detailed randomized clinical trials; (3) for our woman-owned digital health start-up we predict successful MVP pilots with target populations leading to expanding geographic regions and high need groups.

Our app will include easy-to-input instruments and polls that collect precise data points per user with frequency in order to measure any changes over time. Our analytics tooling will enable us to track and visualize these changes precisely. - For individuals we predict well over 50% of our users will report regular mood boosts that maintain or improve over time.

Our analytics pipeline is designed by an industry leader to track and provide these insights for the field of mental health including the top 3 most effective interventions segmented by specific patient populations in particular regions around the world. - For digital health research we predict that the first 12 months of data will provide novel insight into the most effective interventions to improve mood and decrease anxiety in particular patient populations that can then be studied in clinical trials.

We will measure success per patient population with several metrics including adoption rate, lifetime use per patient, churn rate, mood improvement rate and anxiety relief rate. - For our woman-owned digital health start-up we predict 4 successful MVP pilots with particular target populations leading to expanding geographic regions and additional high need groups.

Better Mental Health Now! is unique because:  1) It is based on strong scientific literature showing that physical activity, breathing and meditation are an effective treatment for depression and anxiety 2) Unlike other depression/anxiety apps that require long-term adherence, Better Mental Health Now!  focuses on the proven immediate effects of physical/activity/breathing/meditation to improve mood. 3) Analytics from our app will provide valuable new clinically-relevant data on the kinds of interventions most effective for immediate as well as long-term including info on activity dose, duration, relevant physiological parameters (HR, respiration) that are most effective. 

Better Mental Health Now! is human-centered.  The system uses powerful machine learning algorithms to personalize and optimize the most effective way to use healthful, human activities to improve lives.  Expert guided physical exercise, breathing techniques and meditation are human-centered activities often available in high socio-economic areas of the world.  Better Mental Health Now! democratizes these practices and makes them available to anyone with a smart device, anywhere in the world.  What’s more, it engages and trains patients in compassionate self-care, leverages the data, and helps develop a metacognitive awareness of self-care that might otherwise not be available for underserved communities.

Better Mental Health Now! is an affordable digital app that will be released cross-platform for iOS and Android, and web-based SAAS for desktop and laptops for older populations that might not have a smartphone or tablet.  In addition, simple text-based versions will become available in countries that do not yet have smartphone technology.   Price structures will be equally as affordable in every country in which the product is released in order to make it completely accessible.  Live coaches will be available on the Better Mental Health Now! Website in order to guide users through installation and set-up.

Every member of the BrainThrive team has agreed to forego salary until the product sales reach a specific threshold.  Development costs for the Better Mental Health Now! MVP are coming directly out of an accompanying book deal for the Founder.  Expert activity guides for medication and breathing techniques have offered their services at one-tenth of their usual rate.  Pilots will be funded through a grant from the federal agency that has already funded the Founder five times.  Once the pilots are initiated the team will raise a small amount of private investment for additional feature development, a small management team and the initial user acquisition plan.  Once milestones are met successfully the management team will raise a larger round of investment for growth.  The technical implementation will be using open source tools for several components of the system which decreases development costs substantially.

The factors limiting the ability of Better Mental Health Now! to succeed are access to organizations serving our initial target pilot populations and technical implementation of the analytics and data science infrastructure for the product including machine learning, however, two members of the team are industry leaders in these areas so any associated risk is well-mitigated. 

http://www.wendysuzuki.com/

http://www.wendysuzuki.com/the-book/

http://www.wendysuzuki.com/about-the-lab/

It was clear that the goals of Better Mental Health Now! and Solve were perfectly aligned, focused on addressing the biggest health challenges of our age with smart, innovative and compassionate new solutions. We are also particularly interested in the expert mentorship and guidance Solve offers at our early stage of development.  While we have a clear idea of the product and goals, we are just starting to build our team and thinking about long-term global scaling so this moment seems like an ideal stage of development to take advantage of the Solve team. 

My current partners are Empire Global Ventures, LLC (www.egvllc.com).

Competitors include meditation, cognitive training and exercise apps.