Stress and anxiety are two of the biggest mental health issues that plague our society as a whole.
From daily life, the finances, to family and relationship issues – there is always something to worry about and stress over. Constant stress and worry brews up an entire host of issues, both mental and physical. Stress and anxiety can cause unpleasant physical symptoms that include by are not limited to headaches, dizziness, heart palpitations, dry mouth, trouble breathing, shakiness, and so much more.
Often, it is challenging to handle stress and anxiety on your own, especially when you are going through a particularly challenging time. Therapy and medications can help, although these services tend to be too expensive for some and not a feasible option. Therefore, IoT, digital health, and technology in the medical and healthcare field have created more cost-effective options to help people manage and overcome their stresses and anxieties.
BioBeats – Hear and Now
What the App Does
BioBeats is a leader in the digital health world and AI world. The company creates various health and wellbeing apps and technology to help people cope with stress in their daily lives. BioBeats has a team of the top individuals in artificial intelligence, smart wearable, machine and computer learning, computer science, and much more.
BioBeats has created and improved their stress management app called Hear and Now. Their motto is, “Mindfulness meets the Sciences,” and helps its users figure out what triggers their stress and anxiety. From there, the app can help guide the user through personalized breathing exercises to help manage and reduce their current stress. This app is helpful because it aims to greatly improve the quality of life of its users.
Hear and Now uses the practice of mindfulness to help reduce stress in the app’s users. However, it is often challenging for users to know if they are doing well or doing the exercise correctly since mindfulness is an individual experience for everyone. That’s why the BioBeats technology measures your body’s small responses to its guided deep breathing to evaluate whether the breathing is having the correct effect.
The App Dashboard
The app dashboard displays your mind, body, and stress of the brain over certain periods of tie. It also gives users an overall glimpse into the patterns of your mind and body and then generates a predictive analysis. This predictive analysis is used to learn how you can most effectively manage and cope with your body’s anxiety and stress.
The Technology
The technology Hear and Now uses is fascinating, complex, and full of important measuring tools. Essentially, the app uses both visual and audio cues to help guide you through the breathing exercise. It collects data, called biofeedback, and then turns that into special tools each user uses to help reduce their stress. The app tracks all of the information it collects so you can analyze that data on your own so you can understand how to best manage your stress over a long period of time.
Getting a bit further into the actual technology, the app uses your smart phone’s flash and camera feature, or your wearable fitness device, to collect your body’s special data. The app is able to take that information and measure and analyze your blood flow pattern to determine your heart rate variability. The next step is for the app’s algorithm to calculate your stress and anxiety levels and then displays those results on your app dashboard.
