Digital Wellness GPS for Underserved Youth

Imagine the pandemic being 25% of your total lifespan — That is the reality for young people who experienced the pandemic in their teens.

Expecting kids to be unscathed from a global pandemic is proving to be an unrealistic way of seeing their reality — An entire generation was thrusted into isolation, both academically and socially. Every young person entered the pandemic as a transitional age adolescent and emerged with mature physiology yet stunted from social-emotional growth.

The CDC reports on teen suicides — 1 in 10 girls attempted suicide in 2021. All other data and reports suggest many teens continue to struggle. 

The unprecedented mental health issues we've been facing globally has only been exacerbated by unhealthy ways of coping by social media. 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.

WE'RE SOLVING FOR THE DESIRABILITY AND SCALABILITY PROBLEM IN MENTAL HEALTH SOLUTIONS IN THE MARKET TODAY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.

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 uphold personal agency and see mental health apps and therapy as tedious which only adds barrier to mental health access.

The evrmore app is a solution that is desirable and scalable to provide:

• Autobiographical Reasoning through Audio Journaling - Because we're always compelled to process our hurts and challenges in life, but we’re often forced into performatively sharing on social.

• Personal Utility for Young Lives With Specific Social & Emotional Needs - Because the social and emotional struggles of young people aren’t often met with interventions that are inclusive.

• Timely Relevance with Lifestyle Context - 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 evrmore app is serving 12 to 25-yr old young people who are fed up with unhealthy socialization online, bound by socioeconomical barriers or cultural and generational biases that prevent them from accessing the right kind of support without feeling judged. We help young people who want to be freed from these social and emotional baggage to thrive by building a strong narrative identity — by voicing their truth and their struggles privately.

A part of this solution set a youth community we've formed 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 upholds 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.

evrmore’s Founder & CEO
“I was a young immigrant child and had an unusual upbringing. I grew up without my family as a preteen, and the road to adolescence was challenging and lonely — This is becoming a common theme amongst both immigrant and non-immigrant youth populations around the world, where the loneliness and isolation are attributing to unprecedented heights of mental health conditions, and an unfortunate byproduct of social media. Having worked in youth development and integrative health counseling with people from various cultural backgrounds, I’ve learned that having a strong narrative identity is the biggest driver for a healthy psychology. Knowing who you are as a person helps us build self-determination and provides an internalized story/narrative identity. This internalized story need not be shared with the world as social media has conditioned us to do, and the path to develop it acts as an inoculation against future mental health issues.”

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.

• The evrmore app currently serves 4k users
• The evrmore youth community currently serves 30-60 members and associated student communities

Being a minority founded 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! 

As many as 20,000 mental health apps exist in the market as of the end of 2021. However, there's a huge gap in digital solutions that help remove the stigma and provide a psychologically safe space for young people who are simultaneously confronting the exploitative tech they're exposed to and their own health conditions.

Social media is a cruel place for the marginalized, laden with bullying and negative influences on mood, mindset, and behaviors of young minds. And mental health apps that care about protocols and diagnosis often exacerbate a chasm of stigma-induced barriers to true psychosocial health and well-being.

Our solution presents an unburdened way of looking at the underserved communities who have traditionally not being able to access support or found convention means isolating and unsupportive. 

Inclusive Betterment & Mental Health Parity for Underserved Youth

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.

• Scale and growth: Create viable partnerships to positively impact all urban areas, focusing on families and young patients in low-income, minority, and immigrant populations in the US and beyond. 
• Engagement: Facilitate empathy-driven and trauma-informed dialogues and industry events geared towards destigmatizing mental health in the rare diseases segment.
• Product and tech: Provide multilingual and cultural-diversity support with improved emotion recognition and machine learning models to present relevant and personalized mental health interventions. 
• Content and features: Establish content partnerships for mentors, counselors, and therapists to innovate in experiences in context and harmony with their rare disease care routine, that engage and improve young people's lives in a disease-agnostic way.

We aim to become a reliable source of predictive analytics for behavioral and mental health data. Using multivariate psychosocial modeling, our machine learning neural networks can scale to provide situational analysis, scenario planning, and historical outcome simulations to help guide the patient care journey for individuals, families, and communities.

Psychosocial Metrics for Promoting Well-Being

Because our surrounding social and emotional 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’s psychosocial health derived from voice data and emotion recognition:

• Social Relatedness (confidence): A person's ability to relate, general ease with and trust in others, inclination to access support, seek social comfort, tolerance of difference, and prosocial behaviors.

• Possibility Development: A person's understanding and openness to possibilities in various areas of life and the desire to explore new ways and concepts to develop towards related goals.

• Resilience: A person's mental and emotional flexibility in the face of adverse conditions, and the ability to attribute growth and learning to progressively adapt to challenging situations.

• Diversity of Interests & Experiences: A person's openness to develop a wide range of interests and participate in ongoing activities or skills-building that are exploratory in nature.

• Attentional Engagement: A person's ability to command a high level of focus and sustained attentiveness towards a specific activity, task, or skill that results in a gradual and synchronous effortlessness.

We're all storytellers — Even when we feel the deafening presence of a debilitating disease.

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. 

Self-integration is the key focus of this theory of change.

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

• Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology. Psychological Bulletin - Alderson-Day B, Fernyhough C. 2015
• Variation in Narrative identity is Associated with Trajectories of Mental Health Over Several Years, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - Adler JM, Turner AF, Brookshier KM, et al 2015

• 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

Our solution provides behavioral activations and mental health interventions via the power of the hero's journey — to turn adversity into resiliency, one story at a time. Because the story that’s going to change our lives the most is the one we tell ourselves every day.

The solution is built on humanistic and depth psychology principles, integrating game theory, mythology, active imagination, and the Tibetan wisdom tradition to introduce mind training and practical skills-building for mental health.

• We use both voice + emotion AI in our technology 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 the 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.

• The psychosocial data provides historical context of people’s mental health and wellbeing status, and the app offers an evolving plan for interventions, so care providers have access to timely patient insight prior to consultation and throughout the treatment plan.

Beneficiary Segments (subsidized through partnerships)

• Underserved young people and families in urban centers

• Refugees/asylum-seekers, immigrants, and displaced youth

D2C - Subscription pricing - Monthly recurring revenue model

MRR $10 (per avg. subscription with varied packaged pricing) for youth organizations, health practices, and counseling centers.

B2B - Tiered contract pricing - Annual recurring revenue model

In 2019 we completed market research and development of the evrmore Minimum Viable Product for initial beta user acquisition. In 2021, we launched our Direct-to-Consumer app for Apple. In 2022, we acquired key channel partners in learning science and integrative health, and we have since been in ongoing contract negotiations with paying business partners.

• 31% trial-to-paid conversion

• Healthy ROA and low cost per install $0.27

• Paid programs kicking off with student-centered mental & behavioral health partners

• Pilot programs kicking off with mentorship-focused enterprise partners