Digital Wellness GPS for Gen Z Mental Health

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of screened depression cases has gone up by 394%. That does not include unscreened hence unreported cases due to lack of mental health access (National Health Council - 2021 COVID Mental Health Data).

The unprecedented mental health issues we've been facing globally has only been exacerbated by unhealthy social media use. At the same time, we're seeing an oversaturated landscape of solutions that are overly pathologized on top of unhealthy socialization perpetuated by big tech.

For someone to receive any level of mental health support, they not only have to face the socio-economic divide but also a highly stigmatized divide that centers around a diagnosis. Young people are involuntarily forced down a path of admission that they're broken and dysfunctional to qualify for support. This leads to a further spiraling in loss of confidence, a healthy perspective about their place in the world, and a connection to a promising future that they're direly seeking in the pandemic aftermath. Even more striking is the disconnect of the available solutions in the market today that lack the understanding of generations that grew up with gamified tech — the digital behaviors of tech natives and traditional mental health apps are sadly mismatched. 

We're solving for the desirability and scalability problem of mental health solutions in the market today.

Current options are undesirable before they’re unscalable. What's needed is a path out of the unwell cycle that helps young people who are fed up with unhealthy socialization online, who want to be freed from chat bubbles and to thrive by building a strong narrative identity.

For tech natives, their digital lives started at a young age. They value personal agency and see mental health apps and therapy as tedious which only adds barrier to mental health access.

Old-School Mental Health Can't Scale and are Undesirable

A sticky solution that is desirable and scalable is something that will provide:

• Instant Gratification - Because humans are problem-centric and we're always compelled to do something to ease or solve a problem or challenge we're facing.
• Personal Utility - Because the greatest science that is impractical and not easy to implement in real-life is not useful science even if it's proven.
• Timely Relevance - Because what we feel strongly about now often doesn't get addressed in time before it turns into something bigger and more difficult to tackle.

The solution is the first voice-based mindtech to help Gen Z’s skillfully navigate key moments in life using mastery-based wellness interventions.

By combining voice and emotion AI using an updated Social-Emotional-Learning framework that helps to train our mind, young people can take a break from the dopamine chase for social validation to instead build resilience and meaningful relationships by first looking within to draw on their inner strengths.

?   Voice record moments big and small. All your life stories are saved into Time Capsules for you to keep, share, and look back on another day.

?   AI processes your voice signals to show hidden patterns in your thoughts and the various energies that influence how you think and act.

?   Discover how getting to know yourself can become a useful way to bounce back from difficult situations, build confidence and self-knowledge as strengths.

We know we resonate with the adolescent population because they value agency, privacy, and a creative and psychologically safe place for growth.

This is the first inclusive mindtech that combines voice and emotion AI to help everyone rise against adversity with resilience. We build solutions that address the digital behaviors, interactions, and experiences of adolescents, especially those who might be going through the most challenging time in their lives, such as the current pandemic, immigration trauma, grief, separation, and other difficult transitions. Life is even more complicated in the post-pandemic world. Having the resilience to thrive is a must-have skill for life.

We're serving 12 to 25-yr old young people who are fed up with unhealthy socialization online, who want to be freed from chat bubbles and to thrive by building a strong narrative identity.

We've formed a youth community to co-create the app experience they wish to see, and to better understand the day-to-day situations they face and how the app could help with these real-life challenges.

By engaging our youth community and inviting them to become part of an advisory committee, we're not only able to provide them with a judgement-free space to share their burdens of growing up in the pandemic, find solidarity within a community that practices diversity and inclusion, but also providing training, educational and internship opportunities to help them build social capital.

We have a deep understanding of the chasm that exists for the have and have-nots and the marginalized communities that continue to stay invisible and underserved. We know that in order to improve lives, we need to first create authentic social communities through shared stories and experiences.

We're hearing that learning loss is the number one concern in education. The truth is much deeper than a cognitive slide - The learning loss comes from social and emotional roots and it hurts young people's confidence and perspective of what their own future holds. — Ivy Mahsciao, Founder of evmore

More tangibly, we have the domain expertise to be able to execute in the space of social and wellness technologies that uphold psychological safety and data privacy. Our leadership team and advisors have over 30 combined years of product design-marketing-management background with a concentration in social and voice technologies that use generative, ethical, and for-benefit frameworks for sustainable social impact.

Being an early-stage startup, we’re persevering through adversity and competition on top of preconceived bias as we’re not a team that matches popular funding requirements: Our entire team is made up of women with immigrant backgrounds. So finding ways to access inclusive funding opportunities is something we need to spend an extraordinary level and energy and time doing every day.

We also know that in order to be able to be successful and bring true value with our efforts, we’ll need practical and strategic support. We believe that we can’t improve things we don’t measure, so having access to support in our impact measurement efforts is key. 

Then there’s the blue sky vision we’re aiming for that will surely benefit from being around like-minded peers who have similar motivations and humanitarian roots. We’d love to be able to scale our solution and human capital so being a part of this community will present us with potentially huge inflection points on our journey to serve our community and stay inspired!

Most young people don't want to use boring chatbots for mental health and feel burdened by tedious therapeutic protocols.

Scripted CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) experiences and deterministic mood trackers, plus all the disempowering self-editing on social media are robbing young people of a strong narrative identity that can help them build resilience.

Wellness monitoring, anxiety detection, mindfulness-based therapeutics have been missing a key ingredient: the personal narrative. We provide personalized interventions built on new voice & digital psych biomarkers from personal audio voice data that provide events-based context for mental health.

And yes, we're already seeing more adjacent incumbents tackling the same problem space albeit not comparable in execution.

In addition to drastically improving access to personal wellness and resilience training for underserved youth, we aim to become the go-to source for all psychosocial health data and personal psychometrics.

We want to become the single source of predictive analytics for behavioral and mental health data. Using multivariate psychosocial modeling, our neural networks will be the most accurate in providing situational analysis, scenario planning, and historical outcome simulations to help guide major events for individuals, communities, and organizations of varying hierarchical structures or complex populations.

Because our surrounding social environment has a direct influence on not just our physical but also mental wellness.

Here are some of the signals we're analyzing that include aspects of the individual derived from voice data and emotion detection:

• Social relatedness (confidence)
• Mastery behaviors
• Resilience
• Attentional engagement
• Diversity of interests & experiences

So fulfilling our desire to record and preserve our experiences constructively is the most effective pathway for healthy behavioral activation. Big tech social has inadvertently pathologized this process with addictive ludic loops that inverted the healthful pathways of socializing. 

It revolves around a narrative framework that helps people integrate their thoughts, emotions, and life experiences with psychological safety and self-directed socialization. This narrative structure with underpinnings of humanistic psychology and behavioral health is the missing key in most mental health solutions that have been overly focused on clinical protocols and not enough on helping people build a strong narrative identity.

This is a psychosocial health model that begins with the individual and extends to the larger underserved communities — by using a narrative framework that includes built-in intrinsic motivation, social determinants of health, self-regulation, metacognition, and reasoning improvements for the individual.

Key Research References (not an exhaustive list)
•  Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning - Harvard Business School 2016
•  Impact of Journaling on Students' Self-Efficacy and Locus of Control - University of Nebraska 2008
•  Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health - University of Texas 2007
•  Putting Feelings to Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli - UCLA 2007
•  Impact of Emotion Expression in Lowering Rumination and Depressive Symptons - James W.Pennebaker et al 2006
•  The Resilience Paradox, European Journal of Psychotraumatology - George A. Bonanno 2021
•  The Theory of Constructed Emotion: An Active Inference Account of Interoception and Categorization, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience - Lisa Feldman Barrett 2017
•  Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes: Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-Being, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - James J. Gross & Oliver P John 2003
•  Variation in Narrative Identity is Associated with Trajectories of Mental Health, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - Adler JM, Turner AF, Brookshier KM, et al 2015

• We use both voice + emotion AI in our core stack as a foundation for the first psychosocial network powered by AI. The evrmore app helps people identify their feelings, gain self-knowledge, and build resilience.
• As part of the psychosocial analysis, we use vocal and sentiment data to create new voice and digital psych biomarkers for detection and monitoring of psychological distress and cognitive decline. This could include other social listening features to create a comprehensive context grid for all the social and emotional data of users, with user opt-in.
• The psychosocial data provides historical context of people’s mental health and wellbeing status, and the app offers an evolving plan for interventions, so optionally care providers have access to timely patient insight prior to consultation and throughout the treatment plan.

The leadership team consists of women/minority/immigration background.

We have diversity and inclusion built into every aspect of our operations, executions, and all technology implementations.

Check out our Inclusive Betterment Principles that highlight the ethical objectives of the evrmore Empathy AI™️ platform.

D2C - Subscription pricing
Monthly recurring revenue model
MRR $10 (per avg. subscription)

B2B - Tiered contract pricing
Annual recurring revenue model
ARR $75K - $300K (per avg. contract)
Mental health and wellness agencies and institutions
Healthcare systems/insurance/payers
Learning management services and Employee Assistance Programs

All of the above

• Preseed equity raised from friends & family
• Cash grants & stipends from accelerator programs - Headstream Accelerator
• Regulation crowdfunding from angel investors