Emooter — A Virtual Mental Well-being Guide for Crisis

Emooter can be used on any mobile or desktop device

Inspiration

The pandemic today doesn’t just affect us physically, it can be detrimental to our mental wellbeing as well. It will cause us psychological distress. Businesses rely on people who are able to do a great job. We need to focus on the mental wellbeing of employees. Otherwise businesses will have a hard time surviving the pandemic and the aftermath.

Stress and anxiety will reduce the ability to work. Conversely, good mental wellbeing at work boosts creativity, innovativeness, resilience, and productivity—all such things that can help businesses get through this crisis!

Few specific problems we are facing at work:

Employees need to be more self-managed (while working remotely) than before. They need to find alternative solutions to everyday tasks and recovering from stress. Employees need to learn to craft their jobs and take care of their mental well-being while working under these new circumstances.
Less supervisor and co-worker support is available due to remote working, increased sick leaves, and increased workload.
Psychological counseling will be harder to get due to the increased demand.

Fortunately, stress and anxiety can be reduced even during a crisis like the pandemic we are facing now. We want to explore the possibility of using our technology in combination with science-based quality content for helping people take better care of their selves during the crisis and the aftermath of it.

What it does

Our app helps you to understand your state of mental wellbeing, e.g., how stressed you are, and offers targeted and personalized ideas on how to improve your mental wellbeing. It also provides feedback for your team as a whole, so that you can better support each other.

The suggestions our app provides will be based on e.g, research from previous outbreaks and how people have coped with stress and anxiety during those. As the current crisis progresses and we learn more also about the mental side of it, this information from researchers and (public) health officials will also be utilized and incorporated in the app's content.

How does it work?

The Emooter app interviews employees regularly with pulse questionnaires.
It gives instant feedback on mental wellbeing and stress levels for you personally and your team.
It suggests and follows-up on exercises and micro-interventions for coping with e.g., stress, and anxiety.

We believe Emooter can have an impact both during and after the crisis

Preventive care to avoid burnouts and exhaustion and to reduce the effect and duration of such conditions.
Lower stress and anxiety levels of whole teams to help them get through the crisis.
Employees will stay more innovative and creative and find ways to keep businesses afloat.

How we built it

We explored studies from previous pandemics, work psychology and different types of therapies for relieving anxiety and stress during a crisis. We started this work during Hack The Crisis Finland hackathon. We also evaluated how much effort would it take to utilize our existing technology for this new purpose and found it to be quite feasible.

We are re-purposing our Virtual Wellbeing Guide Bot

Scalable solution that works on all devices. No need to download anything.
Available in multiple languages.
All the content in the app is and will be based on scientific research.

Challenges we ran into

As the crisis has progressed, our research partners have been hard at work. This is why we need to expand our network of psychologists, I/O and work psychology researchers and practitioners to be able to produce quality content and fully implement this idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a startup with limited resources, we feel we did a great job in quickly finding a feasible, quick-to-implement way to re-purpose our tech and service to help people as well as businesses in this situation.

What we learned

A lot of research has been done on handling the added stress and anxiety caused by pandemics and other crisis. There is a great opportunity in learning from the past experiences and research and with that knowledge make a real impact on how well people, and thus businesses, can cope with this situation.

What's next for Emooter — A Virtual Mental Well-being Guide for Crisis

Call for collaboration and support

We believe our proven technology with content tailored for this global situation could help businesses around the world. With support from partners, collaborators, and sponsors, we can build all this in just a few weeks. We would love to offer it free-of-charge to sectors critical for the functioning of society. The first version could be ready in a week.

Future plans

We will continue to develop the concept, and explore partnering and sponsorship possibilities for speeding up the implementation of this idea.

We have also identified opportunities to make this service even more approachable and impactful:

As more people are working remotely and already using communications tools such as Slack and Teams, we could implement a chat bot on those platforms to bring our service where the users already are.
Data-integrations to our app could open up new possibilities. Integrating with e.g., personal trackers and wearables (e.g. Fitbit, Oura, Apple Health, Google Fit) could be used to combine physical and mental wellbeing data for better accuracy and a holistic approach to well-being.
Integrations from our app to KPI/Dashboard tools, ERPs, or other software could help leadership of companies to understand the evolving situation in the workforce better and to take timely actions.
Voice biomarkers could be used to make the evaluation of e.g., stress level more accurate. Combining subjective assessment with biomarker data could lead to deeper understanding and better targeting of helpful content.