Stable

Stable solves the skewed balance of a life caused by one's intense expectations, a self-stated over-use of social-media, and regrettably overlooked, key mental-health foundations.

The user begins their interaction via the free mobile app.

Upon download of The Stable App, you will choose the design, pick essential-oils, configure your sleep-clock settings, and select your first Balance Practice. Your Balance Buddy arrives preconfigured.

Balance Buddy is a reimagined personal assistant. It is a sleek, natural-light emitting, ultrasonic essential-oil diffuser, which serves as the physical home to your Balance Buddy AI.

When you wake up and before you fall asleep Balance Buddy will greet you along with an energizing or soothing essential-oil, natural light, and peaceful music. Based on your response to a couple questions, Balance Buddy will begin a selected Balance Practice.

Balance Practices can be 1 to 10 minutes each. They include both passive and active practices, each of which is derived from ancient philosophies like Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism along with peer-reviewed research in the areas of behavioral science, neuroscience, psychology, and more. User choose from our library of practices, follow a predestined pathway, or allow Balance Buddy to select one based on what it knows about you.

Privacy is paramount. We include a microphone cover and guarantee to never sell or share data.

41% of Gen-Zers say that they waste too much time on social media. This statistic is alarming. Nearly half of Gen-Z struggles with how much time they spend on social media. It is even more of an issue if used while waking-up or before bed. It is a risk for exposure to negative or unhelpful thoughts that can set the tone for how productive a day is or how restoring a night's sleep is. 

According to an article that helps social media pages decide when to post to hit their audience, the grouping of Media and Higher Education suggest 6-8am and 8-10pm, a.k.a. when User is waking up or winding down for bed.

This suggests key characteristics about our target audience. Our first round of users end up struggling with poor sleeping habits, anxiety, depression, a defensive and misleading ego, as a result of poor foundational habits. These downfalls can lead to unreached potential for millions of bright, creative young-adults.

The older Gen-Z population (20-24) are at a major turning point in their lives as most of them are beginning to almost fully take care of themselves and live away from home. This can be rewarding if set up with great habits, or detrimental otherwise.

We have defined 2 user personas:

User 1:

• Recent College graduate who landed a job but not their dream job
• Makes $45-74k / year
• Sleep trouble: Not being fulfilled with day's achievements
• Trouble getting out of bed: Want to stay comfortable and not start the day yet
• Uses social media at both of these times (night: to numb mind into sleep, morning: to ease the morning's inertia)
• Loves following media accounts like Barstool, CNN, HouseOfHighlights

User 2:

• Junior / Senior in college, excels in most courses, but loses sleep due to academic stress / studying
• Quiet, sometimes not confident
• Highly efficient at high level tasks, may have overlooked some basic mental health foundations
• Uses social media to get extra rest in the mornings, to escape before bed
• Follows high-thought accounts like The Economist, The New Yorker, NASA

User currently aims to solve the problem of negative social-media habits through a successfully-integrated array of sources like meditation apps, social-media timers, streaming services, humidifiers/diffusers, blogs re: good habits, advice from friends / family, etc. However that is challenging due to the multitude of sources at hand and numerous habits that need to be built while also focusing on the everyday struggles of a new adult.

Stable provides the trustworthy, research-backed, one-stop-shop that User can acquire and fully depend on. User can peacefully start and end each day fresh and fulfilled without having to lean on social-media. Stable's powerful practices guide User to the foundation from which they can reach their potential.

So far, as Stable is still in its infancy, I have yet to directly involve people in the process of its design / development. 

I am, however, building relationships with potential advisors. Thus far, I have met with a co-founder of the Stoic Fellowship, a PhD candidate at Cornell Medical School, a Post Doctoral fellow at Cambridge Health Alliance's Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, a Senior Lecturer of Strategy & Innovation at Boston University, and a patent attorney.

Before I designed a solution, I had 20 discovery interviews with potential users as well. 

My communication with the potential advisors, the responses from the discovery interviews, my personal experience, and my research have led me to this iteration of Stable.

There is a lot of work to be done. There is also great potential for testing this solution. Through my network of alumna both from high school and college, I have extensive avenues for finding individuals that would help the initial phase of testing the solution hypothesis. Funding opportunities need to be explored through these same networks and will be discussed later.

There is clearly a lot of work that must be completed before this project moves into the prototype phase, however it is well set up to begin launching in the concept stage. The biggest hurdle at this moment would be finding a co-founder and founding team, though I already have some names in mind, and I would like to fully flesh out my thoughts before taking this step.

Thus far I have been able to compile a good deal of research and have painted two clear customer profiles. From these profiles, I was able to design a first attempt at a solution for a complex and important problem.

The main component of our software is a machine learning NLP algorithm that can parse speech for data (never sold/shared). There are already examples of speech-to-text AI like otter.ai and NLP text parsing like SpaCy. While this technology is not new, there is room for improvement to hone in on accents, speech impediments, etc. 

The tech stack will include components required for traditional IoT devices. The app itself will likely be built with MERN, Ruby on Rails, or Serverless stack approaches.

The physical product is a combination between an AI personal-assistant (with a coverable mic for privacy), a natural-light-emulating alarm, an essential-oils diffuser, and an array of practices that are read through built-in speaker or headphones. A key technology in this product is the ultrasonic humidifier, which is currently the most energy-efficient humidifier technology, and the one cool-mist option that can be built to work with essential-oils. The dual-cartridge allows for two different oils to be used. 

In the long run, we would like to make our own essential oils using oil from plants that we would cultivate in-house using permaculture, non-GMO seeds, organic fertilizers, and recruiting local beekeepers that ideally remove beehives from urban areas and seek a new home for them. Pre-MVP: oils would be third party.

A short note regarding ancient practices: lessons/practices from Stoicism, Zen-Buddhism, Hinduism (chakras, yoga), Catholicism / Judaism / Islam, and more will all be paired with modern philosophies, and modern peer-reviewed studies. 

0 people served currently.

Within a years time, due to the early stage of this concept, we can set a goal of serving 100 people, with a reach-goal of serving 1000. 

Within several years, we aim to be able to serve hundreds of thousands through contracting massive, environmentally-friendly farms across the globe. 

We will service our application using AWS as the primary cloud provider due to its low-cost and scalability, and Google Cloud as a secondary provider for its focus on ML capabilities. 

The key assumption is that Stable will help replace social-media usage in the mornings and at nights. Therefore, our key impact goal is to have at least 2/3 of users reporting less social media usage in these key timeframes over the period of a month. This is strongly dependent on the 'stickiness' of our solution. Numerous rounds of testing should occur to discuss the key aspects of how people will come back to this product rather than ditch it for their phones. We need to hone in on features, content, and simplicity through these tests.

As an extension of our product, we also seek to create an army of well-informed users who have noticed benefit in their life whether a better sleep cycle, less anxiety, stronger habits, or an overall egoless positive outlook. Our next impact goal is that 1/5 users will serve as mavens in their respective communities, spreading the information they learned from our device. This emphasizes the role our research plays into a successful product. All content must be curated to include only high-powered practices from ancient philosophies to modern science. We cut out the painstaking ours spent on "self-care" blogs and articles and provide peer-reviewed knowledge from our device, which, if the information is simple and works, will be shared with the friends / families of the user in order to enrich their lives as well.

I will be blunt. My short-term solution provides stability to the most privileged in this world. However, as educators know, you must first learn yourself, and then you can share your knowledge.

Looking short-term again, we will measure:

• % of Users reporting less social-media usage at nights, mornings
• # of daily/nightly user interactions
• # of engagements with each practice
• User stats over time (fulfillment, ease of finding stillness, routines, etc. all collected through daily / weekly reflections)

The UN's goal #16: promoting peaceful and inclusive societies is our main target. As such, we must also measure:

• % of users that share information with others
• % of users that feel obligation to share their peace
• # of stakeholders / thought-leaders / content-creators that represent different backgrounds (Buddhism, Stoicism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, etc.)

Stable seeks long-term to create an army of people who are non-judgmental and accept all as equals to themselves. Stable believes in an egoless drive for peace in which all peoples (from immense poverty to filthy-rich) participate. Stable believes in standing up independent organizations across the US and the globe that seek to teach enriching mindsets from diverse perspectives, faiths, and philosophies as described above. The road ahead is long and arduous, but by breaking it down and helping teach these beliefs to privileged people in need of foundational grounding, we can be part of the greater solution and provide the platform from which they spread this knowledge to the world at large.

While some of the goals above will spread a lifetime, there are some significant barriers in simply helping Stable take flight.

Network:

Though my network is growing, the biggest hurdle to success is finding co-founders with powerful skills in needed areas and similar ideologies.

Funding:

Testing requires designing and building at least 100 devices per round of design. While steps can be taken to ensure modularity (the shell can stay the same each iteration), this is a major cost that requires outsourced funding. 

The software will also require funding not just in building, but also in hosting and securing for public consumption.

Technical:

Significant technical prowess is required, though all desired tech is currently available and within reach.

Cultural:

Both short and long-term, it will be difficult to teach people from the array of knowledge that comes with ancient philosophies / beliefs and also from modern science. Some people have strong roots in one of these perspectives, and therefore they may reject any others. This is an issue that will need to be monitored and our methods will need to be agile enough to adjust when necessary.

As I am currently alone on the team, I will briefly describe my background.

I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University where I also served as the Vice President of a student organization aimed at building leaders and a student advisor for the College of Engineering. 

I went to high school at BB&N in Cambridge, MA where I had the honor of serving as a peer counselor.

As such, I have had numerous conversations with students who were maybe doing well in classes but were struggling with foundational aspects of their lives, which caused anxiety and diminished success.

In fact, I myself fit into my target audience, as well as a number of my peers. I nearly dropped out of BU as a sophomore and again as a junior. I had two semesters where I completed 8 credits (two courses) and dropped the rest due to horrid mental health. I saw my friends deal with similar issues, and it drove me to figure it out for myself and then try my best to share my solution. I feel obligated to help others.

However, personal experience is nothing but anecdotal evidence. I seek others who have had similar experiences in different communities.

I have some degree of experience building Serverless applications, and minimal with implementing machine learning. 

I also have limited experience in performing scientific / peer-reviewed research.

Finally, I have done a good deal of research into ancient philosophies, but am by no means an expert in any one of these areas.

In short, I am at a major disadvantage due to my shorthanded staff, however I have full confidence in my ability to gather advisors and a team.

No current partnerships, however we seek to partner with the following:

• Stoic Fellowship: Already in communication with a founder
  • Assist with research / content creati
• Cambridge Health Alliance
  • Assist with outreach programs / research
• Boston University College of Engineering
  • Testers / Design through the help of student programs such as Senior Design Project