Animo Health

Animo Health enables users to securely and privately track and take action on their mental health symptoms.

It is time to end the stigma around mental illness. Mental and substance use disorders are the leading cause of disability worldwide. Even though treatments are available for many mental health problems, nearly two-thirds of the mentally ill never seek help from a health professional. According to the WHO, stigma, discrimination, and neglect prevent sufferers from seeking care and treatment. We believe that in order to end the stigma, we need to normalize the idea of caring for your mental health, and this is what we hope to do with Animo.

Animo Health is a mobile app for Android and iOS that enables users to track their mental health symptoms and care plans. Using mobile versions of tests such as PHQ-9 and GAD-7, Animo Health users can get an objective measure of their levels of illnesses such as Depression and Anxiety. Further, the app gives recommendations to users on next steps they can take to alleviate their symptoms. These next steps are then tracked to give users an understanding of their adherence to care plans. The app is private and secure, giving users confidence that they won’t be discriminated against for caring for their mental health.

Initially we will focus on building tools to help those who have already been diagnosed with a mental illness. We believe this population is in need of more frequent feedback to help them stick to treatment plans. Additionally, Animo Health can increase the efficiency of visits with mental health professionals. For example, instead of a patient having to synthesize all of their historic symptoms to a caregiver, Animo Health allows them to simply show a caregiver all of their tracked symptoms since the last visit.

After building an effective tool for patients with mental illnesses, we will expand to the general public. Being self-service, Animo is well positioned to scale up it’s services to anyone with access to a smartphone. We will certainly have to work to convince people to care about their mental health, but we think a secure and private tool is the only realistic solution.

In the future, we hope to push the early detection of mental illnesses forward. By using data from opt-in users, we believe we can find new signals of mental illnesses. These signals may one day prevent people from unnecessarily suffering through a mental illness that could be mitigated early.

Through Animo, we hope to make a dent in the stigma, and help push the mindset around mental health forward. We’re passionate about this problem and are committed to solving it.

The initial version of our app is currently available for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/animo-health/id1357987215?mt=8&at=10l6Xd&ct=homepage and Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.animolabs.animo&rdid=com.animolabs.animo&pcampaignid=MKT-Other-global-all-co-prtnr-py-PartBadge-Mar2515-1 . If you check it out, we would love your feedback. You can contact us here: http://www.animolabs.com/contact-us/.

People have built mental health screening apps before. However, there are a few key additions we are making to the landscape with our app. 

1) Security / Privacy

All test result data is encrypted and stored only on the device. Further, a fingerprint confirmation is required to gain access to these results. 

2) Trend analysis

Static test results can be biased by normal fluctuations in mood. By making recommendations to users based off of trends in scores we can provide more meaningful advice to our users. 

Historically, mental health questionnaires have only been given to people after they decide to seek help. Technology allows us to reach more people, reach them earlier and get more honest answers (by making the results private). 

On the product side we plan to build adoption to at least 10k active users in the next 12 months. For the next 6 months we will stay focused on Depression and Anxiety and iterate on the product to make it the best experience possible. One important improvement on our 6-month roadmap is to add other languages such as Spanish. Starting in 2019 we plan on expanding to other mental illnesses.

On the business side we plan on raising enough money in the next 12 months such that we can fund a small team to work on this idea full-time. 

In the next 3-5 years we plan on expanding our efforts in a number of different ways:

Adoption - In the next 3-5 years we want to expand our offering to countries outside the US. 500k MAU's is our 3 year goal. 

Product - In the next 3-5 years we want to cover all the main mental illnesses. Additionally we will start an opt-in data sharing program to help further the science of early detection in mental illnesses. 

Our solution is self-serve. Anyone with a smartphone (Android or iOS) can download it and use it. 

Initially, our focus will be on spreading the app through existing mental health / community health workers. 

We are currently serving ~100 users. These are the people that downloaded our app before we've put any work into building adoption. 

>10k users in the next 12 months. These users will mainly be added by spreading the app through mental health workers and organizations.

500k users is our 3 year goal. We will mostly reach these users through internet advertising, mainly Facebook.

• Software Development 
  • iOS / Android / Web
    • >5 years experience developing websites and iOS apps
    • 3 years React and React Native development experience
• Marketing 
  • Video - created a product launch video for a previous startup with over 1 million views to date
  • Targeted Internet Advertising - 3 years of experience in 1-to-1 internet advertising
• Data Analysis
  • 2 years experience working with large datasets (upwards of 8petabytes)
  • Basic ML

The Animo Health app will always be free.

We will initially make money through affiliate marketing. There are an increasing number of mental health services available to consumers, from meditation apps to services that help you find a therapist. A key component of Animo is to recommend next steps that users can take to alleviate their symptoms. As part of these next steps recommendations, we will refer users to other services in exchange for a commission.

We're applying to Solve in order to get assistance in spreading awareness of mental health. We believe through services such as Animo, we can change the perception of mental health and reduce unnecessary suffering Atkins the world. 

A key barrier for our solution to succeed is building adoption. We will initially be focused on building adoption amongst those suffering from mental illnesses. Our long term goal is to end the stigma around mental illness however, and in order to do that we will need buy in from the general public. Solve can help by connecting us with people and organizations that can assist us in building adoption and changing the public opinion around mental health.