Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Help Me… Calm Down

Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Help Me… Calm Down

Part one of our two-part series on mental health and technology.

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Tech-enabled chill
This week’s issue is the first of a two part series on mental health and technology. American adults, young adults and teens are reportedly increasingly anxious (in 2018, approximately 18% of the population suffered from an anxiety disorder). In addition, Americans spend an average of nearly 12 hours per day consuming media and interacting with screens. We’re asking how tech can help improve our mental health using the mediums we use the most.

In this first installment, we’ll explore the apps and hardware available to address and help manage mental health challenges. We’ll highlight new products to practice meditation, talk to a therapist, monitor sleep cycles and track mental health biometrics.

We’ll then assess the tech industry’s (and society’s) readiness for the end of Moore’s Law, ask what, if anything, comes after the end of industrial farming, and learn how teams can spark creativity by embracing uncertainty.

We hope you’ve been enjoying this newsletter and would love any feedback (erica@nycmedialab.org). Thank you again for reading!

Best,
Erica Matsumoto
NYC Media Lab

The NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health observes that “technology has opened a new frontier in mental health support and data collection.” From mobile apps to wearables and beyond, these are some of the most interesting applications of technology in the mental health space right now that offer users new ways to practice meditation, talk to a therapist, pair patients with prescriptions, and monitor biometrics and brainwaves.

ACHIEVING ZEN AND BALANCE

The slogan “there’s an app for that” is becoming increasingly true in the mental health space. In fact, the meditation and mindfulness app market is expected to grow at an ~8.5 percent CAGR from 2019–2029. There are thousands of apps that seek to help users deal with mental health concerns, track moods, and more.

We’ll start by taking a look at apps that aim to help users learn meditation practices. Meditation apps such as Calm (which has over 60 million users and raised $88 million last year at a $1 billion valuation) and Headspace (which has been downloaded over 62 million times, boasts over two million paying users and raised $93 million this month) are among the best-known, widely-used mental health apps. These apps are both meant to help users learn meditative practices to boost mindfulness. Both generate revenue based on subscriptions.

To address skeptics’ concerns about its value, Headspace is pursuing 70 clinical trials to provide scientific validation for health claims around mindfulness and meditation. Should these clinical trials bear fruit, they would also validate these apps’ pitches to companies as useful components of employee benefits programs and unlock government payments for mindfulness therapies to treat a variety of medical conditions.

However, even though they combine to account for about 70 percent of the meditation/mindfulness app market, Headspace and Calm are far from the only mental health apps out there. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) lists numerous apps to help manage anxiety, PTSD, and more via meditation, mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), journaling, and more. To help potential users navigate its recommendations, the ADAA even has a five-category ratings key for every app it reviews:

Source: Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) In addition to apps, online therapy services such as Talkspace — which boats Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps as a high-profile spokesperson — are yet another way in which technology can be used to support mental health. Check out Phelps talking about how therapy saved his life:

Like Headspace and Calm, Talkspace has raised significant capital to support its expansion. Last spring, it raised $50 million in a Series D round led by Revolution Growth. And, like Headspace and Calm, Talkspace isn’t alone in its niche. Maven — a women-focused platform for connecting patients with doctors, including therapists — is also vying to become the go-to platform for people seeking a therapist who they can speak to without having to put pants on. MONITORING BIOMETRICS OF MENTAL WELL-BEING Hardware — and specifically wearables — is yet another area where technology can be used to support mental well-being. Muse, a headband designed to sense the brain’s electrical rhythms that pairs with a smartphone app to provide real-time information about achieving a calm state, is a good example of this type of technology. Like many other mental health-supportive wearables, Muse combines hardware and software to give users the data they need to support their pursuit of mental health. PICKING A BETTER PILL As in pharmaceutical development (read our previous issue on this topic here), AI’s use in mental health treatment is growing rapidly. New research published in Nature Biotechnology indicates that AI that analyzes patients’ brains, not physicians’ clinical judgment based on symptoms, may be the best way to determine the best treatment plan for patients with depression. Given that only about 30% of depression patients currently respond positively to the first drug they’re treated with, an improvement in treatment plans’ efficacy could meaningfully improve patients’ lives.

Other uses of AI to improve patients’ mental health include AI-powered chatbots, AI analysis of people’s Facebook posts or phone use to predict depression, and even the use of algorithms to mine infants’ EEG data to predict autism diagnoses in patients as young as only a few months old. CAVEAT EMPTOR Despite the great potential of technology on mental health, it’s important to be aware of some important caveats. Here are a few to bear in mind:

• Not all technological interventions have been scientifically proven, so their efficacy isn’t guaranteed
• No single app or hardware can be universally applicable to all individuals or all mental health concerns
• Privacy is always a consideration. It’s important as users and builders of tech to ensure that apps and hardware are designed to safeguard personal data
• Mental health tech and how they are marketed are not regulated. It’s important to understand that mental health apps don’t need to go undergo (and be consistently subject to) regulatory approval and oversight in the same way as pharmaceutical products

We’re not prepared for the end of Moore’s Law In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached 65,000 by 1975. When his prediction came true in 1975, Moore revised his prediction into what has become Moore’s Law: the doubling of transistors on a chip every two years.

Since Moore made this prediction, Moore’s Law has defined the trajectory of not only technology, but also of progress itself. However, the end of Moore’s Law is inevitable (in fact, depending on who you ask, it may already have occurred). MIT economist Neil Thompson, for one, warns that the technology industry, and society at large, isn’t ready for the impact of the end of Moore’s Law. 10 min read The end of farming? Human agriculture has been degrading land, destroying wildlife and warming the planet for decades. Today, “rewilding,” a revolution that could bring about the end of farming is afoot; but is it really for the best to end humans’ harnessing of the land for sustenance in favor of letting nature run its course as it will? 28 min read Spark Team Creativity by Embracing Uncertainty

Although businesses appreciate the value of creativity, they often struggle to inspire it in their teams. Artist and MIT Sloan lecturer Aithan Shapira suggests four steps to foster a more creative culture by embracing the unknown:

1. Understand the end goal of the creative pursuit
2. Encourage creative tension and allow team members to challenge each other productively
3. Invite contributions from unexpected places and don’t pigeonhole people into their functional roles
4. Examine every idea from both the positive and negative perspectives

4.5 min read This Week in Business History

February 25, 1901: U.S. Steel incorporates as the first corporation to be initially capitalized in excess of $1 billion (the stock is valued at $1.4 billion)

Its first president is Charles M. Schwab, who masterminded the seven-company merger that created the company. Other major beneficiaries of the merger are Andrew Carnegie, who becomes “the richest man in the world” by selling his steel interests in Carnegie Steel Co. for $250 million, and J.P. Morgan, who controls two of the seven merged companies and receives massive fees for underwriting the deal.

The company controls 65% of the American steel market at its incorporation and grows through acquisition throughout the 20th century. Today, it — like the rest of the U.S. steel industry — faces significant headwinds due to international competition and a decades-long downward trend in the domestic steel industry.

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