Portable Mental Health Tracker and Aid

According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety are the most common mental health disorders, costing the global economy USD 1 trillion per year. 22% (EU) and 83% (US) of the entire workforce are affected by work-related stress, resulting in over USD 210 billion in healthcare costs per year due to absenteeism and treatment. The reason mental health problems are so high is because people have little awareness of their cognitive states or how to help themselves. Mental health treatment such as therapy or medication can be quite expensive and many people don’t have the finances to cover these costs. Furthermore, many people think mental health isn’t a real problem or that there is nothing that can be done about it, so they choose to ignore the problem despite the consequences. We have built a people-centered neuro-headset that provides easy access to affordable mental health tracking and professional aid. 

CURVEX provides a hardware and software package. Our hardware is a lightweight and easy-to-use neuro-headset that can measure signals in the brain. The way this technology works is by having electrodes detect the electrical signals (EEG) that neurons send to each other when they communicate. Just like how a computer performs its various commands with a specific code in a specific place, the brain has specific codes in specific places, which all mean different things as well.

CURVEX analyzes these natural codes in realtime and translates them in our app into easily understandable metrics that reflect human thinking. These metrics include:

1. Cognitive Load = How much mental energy is being used to understand something or solve a task, such as a complicated math problem. 

2. Focus = How much concentration is being used on a specific thought, activity, or assignment. 

3. Flow = High performance and output, yet low cognitive effort, indicating familiarity and comfort with a particular activity.

4. Working Memory = How much effort is being used to hold information in short-term memory, such as remembering a phone number. 

5. Mental Fatigue = How tired the brain is from using it.

6. Stress = A state of mental or emotional tension resulting from demanding circumstances.

These metrics give users realtime insights into their various moods to let them know how challenged, engaged, stressed, or focused they are. With this information, users can optimize their performance by doing the type of work that’s best for the state of mind that they are in. They can also track how well they are doing over a period of time when participating in a mental health intervention such as stress reduction. 

These mental health interventions can be accessed through our CURVEX app. Our app provides guided meditations, breathing exercises, and other mental health tools for our users to listen to or interact with to work on their mental health from home. Mental health professionals can also upload talks, workshops, and various kinds of guides so that users can listen to them any time they need. Some of these uploads will be for free to promote the professional, and some will be behind a paid wall or subscription fee.  

Through the combination of our headset and these various mental health services, users can track their cognitive signals and monitor how their levels are changing during a session and over a long-term intervention and make adjustments according to their goals. Therefore, just like how pedometers incentivize people to keep track of how many steps they take and reach daily goals, our headset incentivizes people to be assertive regarding their mental health and in overcoming stress, anxiety, depression, or any other mental health challenge.

Today, there is a strong trend for people to track their various biometrics and behaviors through smart technologies in order to improve their health and/or optimize their performance. However, in the past, if people wanted data regarding their cognitive states, they would have to seek out a hospital or research institution and then get assistance from a professional to use their sophisticated equipment and complicated neuroscience algorithms to turn the raw EEG data into understandable and actionable metrics. CURVEX allows these same mental health enthusiasts to access personal cognitive information without the hassle of leaving home, using complicated systems, or having to figure out what the data implies. Therefore, our solution is a one-stop shop for anyone who wants a cheap and simple tool for being more aware of their cognitive states, while also providing various forms of mental health interventions to practice where they can monitor their performance and improve their mental health as they move along in their personal program.

Apart from individuals who want to improve their mental health, there are many industries that benefit from our cognitive tracking ability:

1. Psychologists, therapists, and other mental health professionals = They can monitor their patients during a session, and over a long period of time, to see if various cognitive levels are changing in the way they want. With this data, they can promote themselves and show validation that their treatment plan is in fact helping people. 

2. Sport Coaches = They can monitor how focused a player is during training and match simulations to see how they deal with stressful situations and block out distractions.They can also make sure their athletes aren’t over-training and are resting when they are supposed to rest.

3. eSports = Similar to sports coaches, video game coaches need to monitor their athletes’ stress levels and overload signals as well. This group is also very comfortable with sitting for a long time and is open to wearing advanced tech gear to optimize performance.

4. HR Managers = They can better take care of their high achieving employees who are at risk of burnout. With better mental health oversight, they can encourage rest and de-stressing, so that they ultimately produce more and add more value to the company. 

5. Ed Tech solutions (VR, digital, and physical). Teachers can not only measure students' test scores, but also monitor their cognitive performance as well. They can see if their students are cognitively overloaded, which could indicate a need for a break or to reduce the difficulty. They can also see if students are bored and underengaded, which means there is room to present more advanced learning material. 

6. Medical practitioners, researchers, “home researchers”. The most valuable feature of our solution is that it grants direct access to the recorded cognitive data from each session. With this health data, users with various levels of expertise and education can perform their own analyses on the data, in the way they want, to look for patterns and features of value.

Apart from the CURVEX team being a collection of neuroscience PhDs and cognitive scientists, everyone involved prioritizes mental health. If a potential project doesn’t directly help people with their mental health, we aren’t interested. Because of this enthusiasm, we have built a broad network of like-minded professionals who help us meet new collaborators and clients.  These people also know we have their best interest in mind and want to serve them as best as we can.

To maintain a close relationship with our B2B clients, such as therapists and executive coaches, we host podcasts and invite them in as guests to not only talk about mental health but also casually promote their service. Uploading their mental health exercises, guides, and workshops onto our digital community also reinforces our collaboration. With this mutually beneficial relationship, they are very willing to give us a lot of personal feedback about how they use our solution and what features would be best for their business and helping their clients.

Apart from our expertise, personal passion, and network of people involved in optimizing CURVEX, there are a number of societal factors which give us a unique advantage. Denmark is predominantly a middle-class society, which means most people have a fair amount of disposable income. Furthermore, since all education is paid for by the socialist government, there are enormous financial resources available for helping people with education and health. Since education is free, having a master’s degree is commonplace, which means most people are highly educated and therefore are more open to something as technologically advanced as a home brain scanner. Also, since Denmark is a homogeneous society, there is a high level of social cohesion and therefore internal trust within the system. Finally, Denmark has one of the highest antidepressant rates in the world, which means there is a lot of interest by both private and public sectors to help its citizens, no matter the cost. Therefore, when a Danish company promotes a futuristic and novel system like our personal brain scanner which can help people with their mental health, it not only satisfies a huge demand by the majority of the country, but it comes across as safe, trusted, and relatively cheap in respect to how much money they have to spend on gadgets, travel, and other luxuries. 

Our solution is far from perfect, and there are a lot of bugs in the software (which we are working on fixing vigorously). Fortunately, our middle class clients are much more tolerant with these bugs and giving us feedback than if we tried to market ourselves to the lower class and historically underserved communities. We use this network to make sure we have the best design and app features by discussing in detail with clients what they need, their pain points, and anything else they may want. We do this with all our B2C and B2B clients from our various industries to get a broad spectrum of opinions regarding style, function, features, and benefits. Our development team is constantly taking these issues into account and adding them to our baglog of bug fixes and feature requests. 

With this system in place, we can optimize our app and streamline its efficacy, with all the best features included, so once we establish ourselves in our primary market, we can offer our trusted services to more people in need. Once this development takes place, we will have built a large community of professionals who will have uploaded their various mental health workshops, guides, and exercises for cheap and easy access. Ideally, by this time, we will have also figured out where some bottlenecks are to reduce costs so we can provide our solution to less financially fortunate markets all over the world. 

Also, in November, Denmark passed a law that required all 2nd grade students to get tested for dyslexia and if they are “gifted” with advanced IQ or other learning abilities. This testing procedure normally requires a lengthy test and individual evaluation from a specialized psychologist. CURVEX has proposed to use our headset to neurologically measure the giftedness of children in a way that can be done simply, cheaply, and at scale. To ensure we do this project with scientific validity, we have build a team with a number of representatives on various school boards for gifted children, educational psychologists, directors at hospitals to aid with research ethics and protocol standards, and are working on a pilot study which we will conduct soon and then pitch to the government for national approval. If this happens, the government and national school board will also be very eager to help us with feedback and optimize our solution to help as many students as possible.

The biggest barrier for us is our marketing. Denmark is a small country and our clients are mostly Danish. We are very happy with this, but we would love to create more international brand awareness. Being selected to be a Solver would immediately give us marketing power and would further reinforce our scientific credibility. With this increased brand awareness, we could get access to more people from all over the world who would want to be on our podcast and spread mental health awareness to people in need. Furthermore, we could also get connected with MIT researchers and scientists who were interested in using our solution for academic studies and projects, which could be published in scholarly articles and other “soft” platforms for scientific enthusiasts like Popular Science for example. This would further create international marketability, credibility, and more opportunities to help people in new and exciting ways. 

While we have a few competitors in the neuro-headset space, they either focus primarily on one service, such as meditation or are focused more on research applications and use many electrodes. Our solution is innovative for a number of reasons, the first being that it is directed towards promoting mental health awareness in all areas of life so that people can live at their best and think at their best. We do this by having business operations in a number of different industries, showing the broadness of our solution’s applications. Furthermore, we are both a hardware and software company, which means that we are not only focusing on building a next-generation headset with more sensors like a thermometer, gyroscope, ECG, and maybe more electrodes, but we are also continuously developing our app to have more features for both our B2b and B2C our users. 

Our solution is also innovative because of the community we are building. Our competitors don’t promote and support other mental health professionals, nor does their app feature these professionals in a community where their profile and material gets promoted in a way where they get passive marketing through our app and therefore access to more clients. None of them have their own mental health podcast either. 

We also take pride in being a brain signal data provider which our competitors don’t do. We allow all users to access to their brain data from each session by simply emailing them a CSV file with the raw data, the frequency bands, and the metrics. We hope that with further use of our headset, and all neuro-headset alike, that we can further support all states of healthcare—from medical research to patient care. Furthermore, we aim to solidify the credibility and scientific accuracy that EEG devices have and establish just as much trust and engagement with our markets as ECGs and pedometers do in the health system.

Our device could be catalytic in the sense that it creates a much-needed trend for people to start tracking and taking care of their mental health. The rate of people suffering from mental health conditions like stress, depression, and anxiety is increasing over the globe, and something new needs to happen in order to change this. We hope to be this solution (or at least be a strong part of the global solution) with the collaboration of other mental health experts and professionals.

For this year, we want to give people a cheap and simple way to detect ADHD and epilepsy. To reach this goal, our team of machine learning experts are developing an algorithm that recognizes neurological signals indicative of either. Currently, using an online dataset, we can predict ADHD with an accuracy of 86% and epilepsy with an accuracy of 90%. These algorithms have not been tested, but we will soon. First, we will gather a group of adolescents from an NGO, which we are already collaborating with, called FitforKids, and measure a group of adolescents who have and don’t have ADHD. Then, we will use our algorithm and see how accurately we can distinguish who does and does not have ADHD. We are also speaking to hospitals to get access to their epileptic patients so that we can record their brain signals and test if our algorithm can properly classify them as well. If we can, we have been in dialogue with Siemens who have a “Digital Health City” solution that connects patients with hospitals and primary care specialists directly. If our algorithm works, we would incorporate our headset into this network so that people who are at risk of epileptic attacks can wear them and their neurological signals can automatically send a trigger to authorities in the event of an attack.

Another impact goal is to educate youth about psychology and mental health through play. To do this, we have begun speaking with the Danish company, LEGO, for two reasons. First, LEGO Education is an agenda to teach science, technology, engineering and math skills for the 21st century, starting with kids as early as in preschool. LEGO has expressed interest in our solution because it not only promotes STEM subjects, but simultaneously teaches psychology and the importance of mental health. Second, LEGO Mindstorms is a buildable robot that encourages scientists of all ages to learn computer science and build a robot. This robot has a variety of sensors like light sensors and gyroscopes, and we want to connect our headset to the device so that users can control it with their thoughts. Since we already produce a robotic spider that can be controlled with our headset, controlling the LEGO Mindstorms robot would be a seamless supplement to our headset’s abilities. This collaboration would greatly facilitate our ability to impact youth regarding their awareness and knowledge of psychology and mental health.

Over the next five years, we would like to get a medical CE marking on our headset to demonstrate the medical efficacy of our solution. We have already begun speaking to people who are experts in this sort of regulation and certification. However, right now, finances are our biggest obstacle in completing this goal. The reason we want to get a CE marking is so we can use our machine learning team to develop algorithms that can classify serious cognitive disorders such as depression. Many of the people in our company, including myself, have been impacted by depression directly or through a loved one. Therefore, the issue is very important to us, and we would like to use our solution to function as a cheap and easy tool to help people diagnose depression as well as aid in their treatment. 

There is one major Danish statistic that we would love to positively impact, and it involves stress. One-third of Danish citizens between 27 and 38 years of age, and 45% of 18 to 26-year-olds are suffering from stress. We hope to make a change in this and reduce stress while also improving people’s mental health.

Unfortunately, we cannot measure our direct influence on the Danish national stress level, but we can measure our direct influence on our users individually. Using our stress metric algorithm, we can record people’s stress levels during various activities. For example, during our guided meditations and other mental health exercises, we can track how the interventions affect users’ stress levels and measure the change between before they started and after. Furthermore, we can track the average of this change over a time period, such as a year, for example, and create a grand average of the total change in stress from all our users over that year. This grand average would show an overall score of stress reduction, which could be used as a metric that defines our progress in our impact goal.

In 2007, Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine published an article called, “Using pedometers to increase physical activity and improve health: a systematic review” Their main finding was that the little device increased people’s physical activity by 2,000 steps per day, which equals about one mile of increased physical activity every day. The lead author said, "This goes a long way toward helping people meet the national guidelines for daily physical activity." The study explains that even though an extra 2,000 daily steps might not seem like a lot, it equals a 27% increase in physical activity. The authors of the study concluded that simply having the goal of increased walking was enough of a driving force for people to motivate themselves to increase their physical activity.

Pedometers are cheap, easy to use, and they provide data and awareness to a variable (daily steps taken), which has otherwise been estimated or completely untrackable. With the ability to track steps, it became possible to make personal goals. Having these concrete goals, instead of vague wishes and desires, help us structure our behavior to achieving those goals. And, when we spend money to help us with our goals, we are further incentivized into putting effort into them. 

We believe that our headset will show similar results to peoples’ improved mental health as pedometers do to peoples’ improved physical health. With our cheap and easy-to-use headset, which provides data and awareness to a variable (cognitive signals), which has otherwise been estimated or completely untrackable, people will be incentivized into changing their behavior to reach their goal of improved mental health. 

Furthermore, we hope to receive similar success as the Peloton exercise bike company has. CNBC published an article, which explained how, “The convenience of being able to take a top-notch studio cycling class on a high tech bike at home any time you want, combined with motivational instructors and a supportive but competitive community of users has created a devoted following willing to pay $1,995 for an exercise bike, not including the $250 delivery fee or the $39-per-month subscription to stream the company’s live and on-demand classes.”

CURVEX similarly aims to give people the convenience of top-notch mental health exercises with state-of-the-art neuro-tech at home anytime they want. And, combined with motivational instructors giving guided meditations, breathing exercises, therapeutic interventions and other on-demand classes, we hope to create an equally engaged community devoted to improving their mental health. 

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2007/11/pedometers-help-people-stay-active-stanford-study-finds.html

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18029834/

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/1...

The technology that we use is both hardware and software. 

Our hardware is a lightweight, portable neuro-headset, which fits comfortably on the head, like a crown. The headset connects wirelessly to our app via a removable receiver, which can be charged with a USB cable. 

Our scalable and multi-platform software uses a combination of Bluetooth, signal processing, machine learning, scientifically-backed data processing algorithms, digital user analytics, realtime data visualizations, cloud storage, and a data email service.

Our team is quite diverse. We have 1 American, 1 Indian, 1 Iranian, 1 Slovenian, 2 Chinese, 1 Pole, and a handful of Danes. One of our machine learning experts is a Chinese female, the other is a Slovenian male. Our CEO never went to university, and our COO has a Ph.D. The oldest is 56 and the youngest is 21. Some of us regularly practice spirituality, others do not. One of our interns has anxiety and always works at home, which means none of us have ever met him. We are not trying to be diverse or inclusive, but our transparent approach to wanting to help as many people as possible with their mental health naturally attracts a broad spectrum of talented people and we are grateful to have them in our team.

Our business model is that we want to help people help themselves (B2C) and help people help other people (B2B). We sell both of these groups our product, which is our headset, and service, which is mental health tracking and help.

Our B2C customers are individuals who want to track themselves and improve their mental health. These are individuals who might already be in some kind of therapy and want to see their progress, or it could be people that are unsure about their mental health and want to do a recording to see their results. 

Our B2B channel is a much bigger market and each client has the potential for multiple users and headset sales. There are many types of businesses that help people that we supplement with our solution. Currently, we are focusing on four: psychologists, sports coaches, HR managers, and researchers. The psychologists value our solution because it allows them to monitor their patients during a session. It also allows them to track the success of their interventions on people over time. This validation method could be used for self-promotion, record keeping, and identifying which types of intervention work best so that they can be implemented more often or replace obsolete practices altogether. The spotlight on mental health in athletics is growing, so coaches would like to help their athletes deal with the pressures of an important match, focus on training, and relax when they need to recover. The same principles apply to HR managers and their high performance employees. With our solution managers can make sure their employees stay mentally healthy, so they can perform at their best. Finally, the researchers get access to raw cognitive data for studies, which is normally difficult to get without having hospital equipment. 

In order to become financially sustainable, we are working in many directions at the same time.

First and foremost, we want to sell our headset and app to B2B and B2C clients. We can supplement our sales by selling our mind-controlled spider. We also plan on selling our data, so that if someone wants to analyze personal data or data from a group, that will cost. If users are not sure how to analyze data and want help, they can hire CURVEX employees at an hourly rate. People can also rent our headsets if they want to do a large study. Our app will also have content requiring either a subscription or a single purchase to access. Some of this content will be provided by mental health professionals in our community, and they will get a percentage of the price for their content behind the app’s paid wall, which will incentivize them to create more content and thus more revenue for us as well.

We are in the process of applying for several grants such as Innobooster and Eurostars. These grants require collaboration with other international companies and, so far, we have come up with two research ideas.

1. Vigo Health is a Latvian rehabilitation app for stroke survivors. Strokes can cause a lot of damage to various parts of the brain, which impairs peoples’ ability to speak or move a part of the body. The Vigo Health rehabilitation app helps people gain back to abilities they have lost through various exercises. We want to collaborate by using our SDK in their app, which will allow their rehabilitation to not only track how well people are recovering physically, but also mentally. For example, if someone loses their ability to speak, and slowly works on getting it back, tracking rehabilitation can be done physically, such as how many words a minute they can say. With our headset, tracking neurological recovery can also be done by seeing how much cognitive load, focus, flow, or stress they are experiencing. In the beginning of their rehabilitation, speaking should produce high cognitive load, high focus, low flow, and high stress, but hopefully as their regain their speaking skills, it should come more naturally to them and produce low cognitive load, low focus, high flow, and low stress. 

2. Replay Institute helps athletes with cognitive learning in Virtual Reality environments. Noldus specializes in behavioral research and has experience with eye-tracking technology. Together we wanted to combine VR, Eye-Tracking, and EEG to help athletes accelerate their learning in a VR environment and get precision metrics on their behavior by measuring not only where they were looking, but also how their cognitive signals were while they were looking at it. 

We are also working on some projects which, if we get positive results from in our pilot projects, will produce continuous revenue. Previously mentioned was the gifted children screening project, and if this is a success and gets government approval, we could be responsible for screening all children in Denmark for mental giftedness, which could easily scale to other parts of the world. Other big projects, which were mentioned earlier, which would help us with financial sustainability are collaborations with LEGO, FitforKids, and Siemens.

Our parent company, MeeW, has bootstrapped us. We have sold 50 headsets so far, and have 140 users.