Living Mind

Living Mind

Inspiration

Late night dinner at a local pizzeria in Vilnius. I and Evaldas met for a casual talk about life, mindfulness, and self-development. We stumbled upon understanding that there are so many digital tools to help people with mental and physical health, but none match the ideas we talk about.

Digitalization, changes, work, social, emotional, and life challenges bring a vast number of stressors to everyday life. These stressors often add to stress-induced mental disorders such as anxiety, panic, aggression, and depression. Constant exposure to stress - real or not - leads to physical problems - sleep disturbances, headaches, unexplained pain, oversensitivity to touch, and sound, therefore, blocking our ability to focus and concentrate, as well as decreasing our productivity.

We asked ourselves - how could we help people?

An app, duh! But how can we involve the people who are not aware of such tools? People who could use that help, but have no guidance. Working is a huge part of life and healthy people lead to healthy organizations. We thought if we would manage to provide value for both the organization and employees - our idea could become a reality.

That’s exactly when we started talking to different professionals and building upon this concept several months ago. Mutually agreeing on a vision to help create a more mindful, physically, and emotionally healthy society. And that's how the original idea grew to something bigger than us.

The Pandemic context

Living Mind addresses personal wellbeing through five different pillars that emerged ages before COVID-19. The social wellbeing pillar got severely affected by the Pandemic.

For many, the everyday context has changed dramatically. From a life full of activities, career, business opportunities, and face-to-face interactions to social distancing and the uncertainty. As a result the four other pillars of individual well-being are constantly getting challenged. The body, the mind, emotions, and purpose. Situation went from slowing down the inner pace to the need for resilience to restrained conditions.

People find it difficult to cope with uncertainty and are very keen to bounce back to the way of life that was not always authentic, effective, and sustainable. For many it was already far from wellbeing.

Pandemic and any other crisis bring complex challenges for individual and organizational wellbeing, therefore increasing the significance of physical and mental health problems across the globe.

It's harder to heal the mind than to rebuild the economy.

This is the extreme motivation and purpose for us to make Living Mind reality.

What it does

Living Mind is a wellness and wellbeing app for organizations and their employees.

It combines academic knowledge from different fields of expertise - mindfulness, psychotherapy, psychology, and neuroscience. This combination allows us to build a set of techniques and tools that bring value. Creating a process that goes from diagnostics to problem-solving leading to behavior change.

For individuals, it’s introspection and self-assessment tools: Mood journaling and self-reflection followed by audio exercises for relaxation or concentration allow people to better understand and help themselves. For organizations, it brings wellness pulse - specially designed surveys to evaluate organizational culture and microclimate. Real-time data reports, and other tools that allow the HR department and the employees to communicate more freely and effectively.

The unique combination of chat and different functionalities aids in creating a personalized experience based on needs. This also allows us to connect specialists with individuals and organizations on-demand to provide support when it’s needed and where it’s needed.

How we built it

Living Mind consists of two parts - The App and The Dashboard.

The app is being built on Flutter and Dart as it allows us to deliver to both Android and iOS platforms. We use firebase and firestore for hosting, database, and distribution.

The dashboard is built on react and integrates well with firebase to provide seamless communication between the two solutions.

The key to making this happen was never about tech only. A unique combination of technology and academic knowledge is what brought ideas and concepts to life. This can only be achieved through teamwork and collaboration.

What have we done during the EU vs Virus Hackathon?

Did initial preparation for app internationalization. Translated our MVP to the English version. Met different specialists across Europe who are interested in collaboration and sharing of ideas.

Made a lot of technical APP and Dashboard improvements.

Through discussion and collaboration with specialists we have gained an even deeper understanding of the theoretical and academic side of our solution. We have tweaked our existing workflows and created concepts of some new features that could bring value.

Further improved structure and content of the product to match the current pandemic situation.

Learned a lot of new information about different initiatives and tools. We grew as a team.

Challenges we ran into

Challenge 1: Professional coach doesn’t tell people what to do. According to client answers he suggests them how to reach their own potential and guides them to it. Building a good chat experience requires a lot of work and different languages make it even harder. It comes as a challenge to create a chatbot that is smart enough to fulfill this role to an acceptable degree by using predefined templates and algorithms .It will require continuous work and improvement, AI integration to make it the reality we dream about.

The good part is that the semi-automated chat solution brings tremendous value as well.

Challenge 2: Creating an engaging self-help and self-development product. We as people, lack time, motivation, and focus. Even if it’s for our own sake. It requires constant work and the right combination of user experience, technology, science, and education to win this never-ending battle for attention and time.

Challenge 3: We don’t know how our users will interact with the product. Given that we made assumptions and planned our product theoretically. There’s a lot of real testing and further research to be made.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The amount of thought than went into building seemingly a simple version of the chat, but what turned out to be way more than yet another chatbot solution. We worked hard on delivering a good combination of live and automated dialog whose central figure and focus is always the user and where dialog can be extended into various exercises available within the ecosystem.

The pitch video for EU vs Virus took around 15 hours total to execute. We’re really proud of the result in a relatively short time.

Value we bring

During the crisis we are addressing several really important issues: remote consultancy, mental health support, organization wellbeing, dealing with change, and social distancing. However, once the crisis is over we will be able to continue bringing value with our solution.

For individuals it’s a buddy that offers help during peaks of intensive emotion or distress - panic attacks, elevated negative emotions, or suppressed feelings. A buddy who recommends exercises that have the potential to reduce the need for pharmaceutical drugs and help to improve many other symptoms associated with hypertension, blood pressure, asthma, cancer, and many other conditions. A buddy that gives questions and tips that lead to discoveries enabling individuals to step out of their habitual/usual emotional, mental, and behavioral patterns. A buddy that challenges with new ideas and questions, but most importantly - helps you to help yourself.

For organizations it’s a tool that allows managers and HR’s to better understand their organizations and employees. Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness, psychological maturity. Different factors that lead to multiple organizational culture wins and failures. Our microclimate surveys bring value by efficiently converting real-time data into practical actions and recommendations. Opening new ways to look into employee engagement, conflict prevention, and effectiveness. Additional app functionality provides essential tools (anonymous questions, surveys, meeting booking) to improve communication between management and employees.

For Everyone: The in-app chat allows users to connect with coaching and counseling specialists on demand. Meaning that consultants can get access to individual data allowing them to provide more accurate guidance in a shorter time. As well as using Living Mind tools to make their job easier and more efficient. The dashboard we have created allows consultants to quickly overview individuals or organizations to provide further and deeper guidance.

What's next for Living Mind

The complexity and amount of technical and academic knowledge and work require a lot of time and financial resources. While we have a very motivated team willing to put in the extra effort, our speed is dramatically limited by financial resources. We estimate a needed investment of around 20 000 euros to make Living Mind a real product. A semi-automated solution and consultancy service could be launched at the end of Summer 2020.

In order to make this product a reality we need to continue testing our product, collecting feedback, and implementing features that bring value. The first tests start in May.

Chat automation with AI and machine learning.

Living Mind is currently being prepared for the Lithuanian market. Once it’s tested we are eager to translate it to different languages. English coming first and then progressing further.

We have laid out a foundation for individual and organizational wellbeing. We will continue adding content and building tools that add additional value. Polishing a process that goes from diagnostics to problem-solving leading to behavior change.

Let's connect

If you are a partner, mindfulness/coaching/psychotherapy specialist looking for ways to collaborate and innovate. If you have any sort of question or collaboration ideas - drop us a message at: rokas@adaptagency.com or fill in the form.