Apply HN: Synaptitude – Remote Mental Health Monitoring and Treatment | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: Synaptitude – Remote Mental Health Monitoring and Treatment

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Synaptitude: http://synaptitude.me

Problem:

According to the CDC, one in five American adults deals with a mental health issue. However, only 44% of adults with diagnosable mental health problems and less than 20% of adolescents receive treatment. That leaves the majority of people with mental health issues untreated. We believe these low treatment percentages are due to a mixture of expensive treatments, the taboo nature of mental health, and the inherent ailments that come with a mental disease.

Description:

We are making a system using an EEG (measures brain activity) and webcam that allows real-time mental health tracking and treatment in the home. This information is then made viewable to patients and to mental health specialists via our app. Specialists can then track patients remotely and test the effectiveness of different therapies and drugs outside an office.

Over time, we will apply machine learning to collected data and use therapists’ and psychologists’ notes as tags. This allows us to improve various offline techniques/activities, notify specialists about critical patients, and automate many aspects of mental health treatment.

We will also provide patients with activities centered around therapy techniques, such as neurofeedback. This will help patients practice self-regulation techniques in their home, as opposed to expensive trips to a therapist or clinic.

Product URL: https://thinksuite.io/

Demo URL: https://youtu.be/6kB-T9Uz65Y

Our YC App Video: https://youtu.be/EOHfLdtHXag

(1) How established is the science on EEG data effectively diagnosing mental health problems? Could you link me to some relevant literature?

(2) Who is your target customer? Are you planning on selling these through therapists/psychologists as a way for them to follow-up with and monitor their already-diagnosed patients? Or is it a direct-to-consumer product that lets an average person diagnose themselves and seek help? I think that the latter approach could have an insanely high adoption barrier.

(1) It is not very well established, but there is evidence supporting it[1]. The problem is EEGs previously were tens of thousands of dollars. We intend to do a study as soon as we have any sort of funding, and we already have people willing to participate, a facility, and a University of Illinois professor advising us [2].

(2) We plan to initially target therapists/psychologists as a way to monitor patients remotely. We will also sell direct-to-customer, and possibly connect them to a therapist/psychologist remotely, or they can use our software without the therapists (this is a less likely route, but we are already receiving emails about it).

Believe it or not, the adoption barrier isn't that high, because people are already trying things such as yoga, meditation, therapy, etc. This is essentially the same form of treatment, just in a different medium. We already have people signed up to pay for our trial, and have people email us regularly.

With a study to back it up, we believe we should have customers. However, we don't know if we wish to go this route. The end goal is to use the therapists initially and eventually automate the entire mental health pipeline.

[1] http://synaptitude.me/blog/literature-overview-of-using-neur...

[2] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Eut-aii72ch7nySpB_oGDLiJx_X...

Thanks for your response! The references cited in your literature overview seems to focus on neuro feedback for ADHD, which is a great market. I remember reading recently that pediatric ADHD is on the rise and that it's super underdiagnosed - I'd imagine an effective diagnosis+management solution in this specific space to be extremely lucrative.

Also, I don't know if you'll get this from others, but simply saying "mental health" made me immediately think of depression and related issues. My suggestion would be to refine your problem and solution statement to narrowly talk about your initial target segment (ADHD, autism, etc.) of the broader mental health space.

Good luck to your team!

Thanks for the suggestion, I definitely agree!

Also, ADHD is usually considered one of the most over diagnosed and under diagnosed diseases. That is to say, you have a high false-positive rate and a high false-negative rate.

That's actually one of the largest issues with mental health today, it's basically a psychologist just saying, "well you probably have this," it's not really scientific. Where are the measurements, why is it so mystical? We wanted hard analytics and that's why we are building this.

Is there actual proof of an EEG recording being useful for diagnosing and tracking treatment of a mental health problem?

EEGs have already been used to diagnose mental health conditions for decades. As for treatment, that has only appeared in the last 15 years or so, with treatments for ADHD, anxiety, depression, and epilepsy[1], using something called neurofeedback [2].

Further, with the advent of consumer EEGs flooding the market it is become increasingly possible to do this at scale. However, these consumer EEGs have a much lower accuracy (85% for consumer EEGs vs 95-98% medical EEGs), and being done in the home is difficult because EEGs are very sensitive to movement.

That's where our companies niche is, we developed an error correction method that works to increase accuracy and remove errors due to movement[3].

[1] http://synaptitude.me/blog/literature-overview-of-using-neur...

[2] http://synaptitude.me/blog/neurofeedback-in-200-words/

[3] http://synaptitude.me/blog/using-computer-vision-to-improve-...

The barrier for most health startups are clinical trials and the Fda. How do you plan to manage that ? and does continuous improvement, like you hint in your pitch, even fit with way the Fda views the world?

Two things:

(1) Our first step is to provide analytics regarding patients focus, cognitive acuity, etc. Currently, this does not require FDA approval, however we will measure accuracy.

(2) Technically, we are providing an alternative treatment and do not need to get it approved with the FDA. In fact, you can already get the treatment we plan to provide (albeit at 10x the cost).

That being said, we are getting setup to run medical trials and already have people signed up[1], we have a facility, and a professor at the University of Illinois to help us with the process. We just need some financing to get it going.

[1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Eut-aii72ch7nySpB_oGDLiJx_X...

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