Mental health has become one of the biggest risk factors in accelerating illness and accounting for the largest component in occupational health claims. Managing mental health-related issues often require individuals’ conscientious efforts to seek suitable treatment regime including psychotherapy, which may be dependent on the availability of therapists or mental health practitioners. This calls for alternative solutions that can support individuals for managing their mental wellbeing, thereby improving their quality of life.
Digital therapeutics (DTx) are evidence-based therapeutic interventions for the prevention, management or treatment of medical conditions or diseases, including mental health-related issues. These include digital self-management implementations in formats such as mobile apps, sensors, virtual reality, or other tools to prompt behavioral changes in users.
Aiming as a transformative DTx to improve health and reduce healthcare-associated costs, the current technology is a clinically proven digital mobile-based psychotherapy tool that collectively measures certain physiological parameters as an objective digital biomarker of stress. With its implementation in smartphones and mobile apps, this provides ease of accessibility to individuals for his/her objective stress assessment. The technology is currently a CE Class I Medical Device and is approved with GDPR, HIPPA, PHIPA, ISO 13485, ISO 9000 and ISO 27001. The Singapore-based technology owner has completed three clinical trials in use cases including cancer, anxiety and athletic endurance.
The technology owner is seeking potential licensees, including players in telemedicine sector, pharmaceutical companies or insurance companies who may have interests to license their stress digital biomarkers via API/white label, and/or the associated proprietary technology.
The current technology is a fully remote, automated digital mindfulness training platform that allows for an objective quantification of stress levels using smartphone photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor.
Heart rate (HR) can be a useful and important physiological proxy for diagnosing various health conditions including cognitive state. The technology comprises a PPG imaging (PPGI)-based objective inference of an individual’s HR and heart rate variability (HRV) from stochastically sampled points of his/her cheek regions, as well as facial micro expressions captured from a 30-second smartphone selfie. The stochastically sampled data are fed into the technology’s neural network giving a baseline. The technology further comprises a populational level dataset that is enriched with digital biomarkers built from self-assessment of stress and emotions.
For stress management, individuals can undergo psychotherapy including general mindfulness-based meditation, music therapy, as well as specific content for cancer survivorship, COVID, new mothers and traumatic brain injury. When a person undergoes such digital treatments, more measurements during and after the psychotherapy are taken. This yields the stress delta and allows the monitoring of an individual’s mental state changes associated with digital psychotherapy. The technology has demonstrated the ability to lower a person’s stress levels by 30%.
The technology can be applied to the following sectors –
End users of the technology platform will undergo a gamified 'measure-treat-measure' experience that allows for personalized and effective psychotherapy to improve his/her mental wellbeing and importantly the quality of life.