Myndi

Myndi is aligned with increasing access to and quality of health services for medically underserved groups around the world. Myndi’s target customer is the parent of a child with a neurodevelopmental disability (NDD), including Autism, ADHD, Intellectual Disability, specific learning, communication, or motor disorders. The quality of information exchange between caregivers and providers is inadequate, and there is a bottleneck when it comes to accessing assessments and services. They need a better, faster, and more comprehensive way to collaborate, which is especially important for historically underserved populations. According to the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Disparities, “Decades of research demonstrates that children from racially and ethnically diverse groups, those with limited English proficiency, and families from low-income households are diagnosed much later than white children and children of higher socioeconomic status.” (Stahmer et al. 2019)

Families impacted by NDDs represent 11% of the worldwide population (870 million TAM). In the United States 59 million families (18%) are impacted by NDD (SAM), and 1 in 36 (2.8% or 9.3 million SOM) children are diagnosed with Autism. Cases rise by 8.5% per year, a sign of progress toward earlier and more consistent screening, indicating a growing, viable market.

As of 2023, the economic cost of autism in the United States was roughly $223 billion/year (54% attributable to incremental education costs, Early Intensive Behavioral Interventions (EIBI), parental productivity loss), and is estimated to grow to $5.54 trillion/year by 2060 (63% attributable to non-medical services and individual productivity loss) (Blaxill et al. 2021).

Myndi is a conversational AI assistant that is implemented within a web application, as well as via messaging interfaces that parents already use daily on their mobile devices (SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.). 

Myndi helps parents to understand their child's unique journey and to refine their approach by providing specific guidance, insights, strategies, and hands-on tools, leading to improvements in overall quality of life. Parents can manage their team, including caregivers, doctors, and therapists, who validate and enhance Myndi’s recommendations.

Parents and their care team (with input from the child) build a persona (digital twin) that includes relevant information, including their likeness/avatar, name, age, diagnosis, sensory sensitivities, likes and dislikes, fears, behavioral challenges, etc. Over time their persona, used to generate highly personalized results, evolves based on the information entered in each interaction and Myndi uses predictive analytics to help mitigate challenges, fear, and anxiety. In addition, based on the system results and recommendations, we are developing the actual tools for parents to use in practice. These include visual supports, such as structured schedules, visual timers, and social stories.

Our initial product focus is on neurodevelopmental disabilities, and we are keen on expanding our scope to wider behavioral health opportunities, including applications for neurotypical children. We are in the early stage of researching use cases and business models for healthcare settings, such as integrating into the Child Life department processes. Myndi can be used to create neurodiverse affirming visual supports and tools that help to alleviate fear and anxiety, which is relevant to all kids going to a hospital for a procedure. The benefits include improved patient experience, quality of care, and psychological well-being of patients and caregivers.

Here is a link to a helpful demo video that we sent to our testers: https://www.loom.com/share/124987ca64964d6a83f79ae2a7cdf8b2?sid=ce243adc-d773-487f-aa3b-af718e1af995

Myndi’s target customer is the parent of a child with a neurodevelopmental disability (NDD), including Autism, ADHD, Intellectual Disability, specific learning, communication, or motor disorders. 

Myndi’s origin and design is based on lived experience of the team and insights gathered from user research. The need and market opportunity for Myndi has been validated through extensive research, including interviews with clinicians, parents, autistic adults, and interactions with hundreds of parents through online communities and support groups.

The desired outcome of using Myndi is improved clarity, personalized care, and agency to push toward positive outcomes and improvements in quality of life. In other words, improved access to services and support, information and guidance.

In addition to the large positive impacts that Myndi will have for individual family users, mass adoption and Myndi’s impact has potential to mitigate the near-term and downstream consequences affecting society on the local and national levels, including:

● Parental productivity loss (56% mothers of children with ASD)

● Lifetime productivity loss of disabled adult individuals (100% severe ASD, 70% mild ASD)

● Cost transfer from caregivers onto government (71% of all adult individual costs)

Our entire team is passionate about helping this community. It is a very hard problem to solve, but we believe it is worth solving. Our team lead, Shawn Poiley, is a father of two neurodivergent children and empathizes with other parents in similar and less fortunate situations. Technical lead, Mark Shervey, is affected by NDDs through close friends and family. Developmental Psychologist, Dr. Ellie Kaplan-Kahn, PhD has dedicated her professional career to researching quality of life for children on the autism spectrum. Lead Product Designer, Gwen Frederick, enjoys working on projects that offer positive societal impact. We have also surrounded ourselves with dedicated, knowledgeable advisors across disciplines, including strategy, product, technology, and behavioral psychology. Our respective skill sets combined with our commitment to improving both short-term and long-term outcomes for families impacted by NDDs makes us a formidable team.

Our design mandate for Myndi is to create a frictionless experience that does not impose additional burdens on parents in order to realize the benefits of using Myndi. From the onset, Myndi’s design has been informed by key input from parents and clinicians to create a seamless and accessible solution.

We launched a functional prototype in December 2023. Myndi currently has 30 external testers, but no official release or production users to date.

Our top goal for being selected as Solvers is to tap into knowledge and to learn how to think about providing our solution at the system level. Other benefits include:

Validation: Getting accepted and aligning with MIT Solve would help to validate Myndi and the work our team has completed to date.

Community: Our understanding is that the Solver network is powerful, active, and generous with time and advice. We would like to participate with contributions from our own experience.

Mentorship: We are not afraid to experiment and to make mistakes, but we want to minimize the ones other people have already made. In service to our customers we would benefit from support, advice, being held accountable, and direct, honest feedback.

Resources: Myndi is currently bootstrapped. The Solver prize would help us to accelerate product development, build out our AI/ML capabilities, experiment with different marketing messaging and tactics, and to test ideas for new use cases.

Thank you for your consideration!

Like its competitors, Myndi originated as a journaling and data tracking tool. Based on user feedback we learned that entering data can be cumbersome, frustrating, and not practical for overburdened parents of kids with special needs. Myndi allows parents to receive instant guidance and feedback via conversational AI, and data is gathered organically over time to provide more personalized results. Myndi differentiates itself from its competitors by going beyond suggestions and creating usable tools for parents that save time and frustration, such as visual supports (i.e. structured schedules and social stories).

Using Myndi will help to improve quality of life for families impacted by neurodevelopmental disabilities by giving parents the ability to effectively understand their child's needs and emotions, and to effectively communicate their child's needs and emotions to their care teams, resulting in improved access to critical support and services.

The methodology used to measure the theory of change for Myndi is based on three sources, including:

The research of Myndi team member, Dr. Ellie Kaplan-Kahn, PhD. In association with the Autism Science Foundation, Dr. Kaplan-Kahn is currently recruiting for a study, entitled “Measuring Quality of Life in People with Autism Spectrum Disorder.” 

The WHOQOL-BREF, or The World Health Organization quality of life assessment.

The Parenting Sense of Competence Scale, Johnston, C., & Mash, E. J. (1989). Parenting Sense of Competence Scale (PSOC), which measures parents’ Efficacy and Satisfaction with their perceived competence with their children.

We are still developing our quality of life goals and indicators. This is an area where we would benefit from mentorship in the Solver program.

Myndi is currently built on Firebase, Flutterflow, and ChatGPT. The next phase includes migrating to AWS and managing our own services as we need more flexibility in development.

Full-time: 1

Contractors/Consultants: 3

Two years

Myndi Enterprises Inc is committed to hiring a diverse team; however, we are aligned with "Solve’s core values of optimism, partnership, open innovation, human-centered solutions, and inclusive technology, we strive to uphold the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and are committed to anti-racism in all the work we do."

This is an area where we would benefit from mentorship in the Solver program.

Myndi is currently free as we gather initial user feedback from testers. The initial business model is Direct to Consumer with a monthly subscription. To help make Myndi widely accessible, regardless of demographics, we will also add new revenue sources by experimenting with a channel sales model via Employers and Government Agencies, such as the Regional Centers (DDS) in California. As the product evolves to serve in a clinical setting we are conducting research into Payor models.

Myndi is currently bootstrapped. The product isn’t developed to a point to justify charging for the service, but the roadmap/features are prioritized to reach revenue status as quickly as possible. In addition, we are exploring non-dilutive funding sources. Our pitch proposal for an NSF/SBIR grant was accepted and we are currently writing a Phase 1 proposal.