This Startup Wants To Track Your Smartphone — To Improve Your Mental Health

When star neuroscientist Thomas Insel left Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences division, last month, he joined a tiny startup called Mindstrong Health. Its mission overlaps with the project he’d led at Verily: Use the world’s smartphones to diagnose, track, and treat mental health disorders.

But while Mindstrong has just 14 employees, compared to Verily’s 500 employees and its hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the startup’s executives say they aren’t worried about their competition. Over the last two and a half years, they say, they’ve already quietly completed a handful of clinical trials that show promise in their patented technology. Last week, they teamed up with a pharmaceutical company that’s developing treatments for neurobehavioral disorders. And on Thursday, they announced that they’ve raised $14 million.

“I’m not worried” about Google, Mindstrong's CEO and cofounder Paul Dagum told BuzzFeed News. “It takes time collecting this data, getting people enrolled. You can’t take a 2.5-year study and make it three months. It’s gotta be 2.5 years. We feel like we’re very much ahead of the game at this point.”

Based in Palo Alto, California, Mindstrong is building an app based on the emerging concept in psychiatry of “digital phenotyping.” Currently, the onus is largely on you, the patient, to seek out a therapist or doctor, and self-report your feelings and moods. But smartphones, with which patients are constantly interacting, could be a more thorough, objective source of data about the state of their minds. Could be: There’s a lot of noise in all that data, and patients would have to give the company deep access to their phones.

Mindstrong hasn’t yet published results from its clinical trials, which tested its technology in people with age-related neurodegeneration, depression, and anxiety. Other similar startups, such as Ginger.io, have previously tried using smartphone data to infer behavioral patterns and mental health problems, only to change course (in Ginger.io’s case to a text and video-chat therapy model).