Smartwatch App Promotes Mental Health
The Digital Health Program Actiself supports prevention and treatment of stress-related conditions
The app actiself, developed at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, leverages wearables like smartwatches to help people experiencing high stress levels and symptoms such as sleep problems, lack of drive, or constant overthinking adopt a more active lifestyle and improve their mental health. This approach is gaining importance, as chronic high stress is among the greatest risk factors for conditions and serious illnesses like burnout or even depression. Since the treatment of mental illnesses can be lengthy and costly, the prevention of these disorders is increasingly becoming a focus of healthcare. This is where the actiself app comes in, with its technology now licensed for commercialization by the spin-off company Biomentric.
Through the prevention app, users gain better insights into their behavioral profile and are guided towards a more active lifestyle in a six-week program. It is not just exercise and sports that play a major role. Social and balancing activities are also central to the application. “Our digital health program actiself enables the detection and treatment of stress-related symptoms to be taken to a new level. On the one hand, the app allows for a better assessment of the symptom profile, and on the other hand, it also offers intervention suggestions based on this,” explains Markus Friedrichs, who, after his work as a research associate at the Max Planck Institute, is now the managing director of Biomentric.
The application was developed under the leadership of Victor Spoormaker. As a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, he has long been studying the use of mobile devices for the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. From a research project funded by the Max Planck Society, the startup company Biomentric emerged, which is now making its first prevention app, actiself, available. Max Planck Innovation, the technology transfer organization of the Max Planck Society, has licensed actiself and holds a stake in Biomentric. Victor Spoormaker emphasizes: “Our approach integrates objective data and behavior measurement via wearables with well-founded insights from psychotherapeutic research. This way, we make globally available expertise in the field of psychological research accessible to a large number of affected individuals in the form of a low-threshold and scalable application.”
Integration of research and entrepreneurship
The technology has already been tested in the clinical environment of the Max Planck Institute and is being continuously developed further. “With actiself, we see once again how the close integration of cutting-edge research and entrepreneurship creates innovations that provide real value to society. It is particularly gratifying to see how this new approach is now contributing to sustainably improving the quality of life for people with mental health impairments,” says Florian Kirschenhofer, senior startup manager at Max Planck Innovation.
Actiself was developed in collaboration with the Hamburg-based IT company Bornholdt Lee, which specializes in the technical implementation of digital health applications.
The download of the app can be found under www.actiself.com