Tagging for Success

At MI we are building the world's most used mental health platform to prevent, measure, and treat cognitive-related diseases. The foundation of this work is our software, AmDTx, which serves as an interface for a clinically-validated, self-assessing and self-learning health tech stack that delivers personalised psychotherapy to patients based on their mood, stress, and intents.

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One of the pleasures of working at MI is the pioneering nature of the work itself. Prescription digital therapeutics like AmDTx reside in a new, quickly evolving field of medicine. Consider that only now in the year 2022 are we seeing reimbursement codes being generated to allow health insurers to pay for digital medicines in North America. Getting a prescription for digital therapies like AmDTx is right around the corner!

The activities we pursue at MI — largely focused these days on clinical validation, patient engagement, and risk compliance — are similarly breaking new ground. And to do what's never been done before requires novel strategies, tools, and techniques. 

As Chief of Content, I have the pleasure of working with world-leading experts in patient care to develop digital interventions that are more effective and accessible than treatment as usual – be that talk therapy or prescription medicines. Internally, we leverage this world class programming inside of design and technical frameworks that apply insights from cognitive neuroscience, mobile user experience design, and data science to personalise mental health and performance training for every single person who engages with AmDTx.

One such tool is the MI Content Catalogue, a catalogue of the 1000+ recorded therapy sessions we have produced to date in six languages and counting. As a team, we have carefully listened to, and tagged, each session by practice type, intent, and verbosity measure, just to name a few. Alongside of each individual user’s pre- and post-session mood and stress measures (including AmDTx’s objective measure of stress calculated via proprietary computer vision algorithms), these tags will inform the delivery of the  most effective therapy sessions for each individual user, at the right place, at the right time.

Below, I describe some of MI Content Catalogue’s tags in more detail. In future posts, I’ll cast a wider net and describe how these tags are leveraged to deliver personalised content for each and every user of AmDTx.

Practice Types:

Throughout time, the goals of mental health exercises, including meditation and psychotherapy, have been to enhance attentional control, body awareness, self awareness, emotion regulation, self-care, compassion, empathy, and perspective taking. We've categorised these exercises into 26 distinct practices based on their neural correlates, ie how they activate and/or deactivate different regions of the brain. All of this work is based on findings published in peer-reviewed literature. In some cases, the neural correlates we’ve have mapped out are well defined and understood; in others the mapping is more theoretical. The non-exhausted list of practice types, listed in no particular order, is as follows:

Open awareness, Noting, Progressive relaxation, Mindful feelings, Mindful thoughts, Savouring, Music therapy, Contemplation, Breathing exercises, Focused attention, Focused attention breath, Loving kindness, Compassion, Guided visualisation, Mantras, Immobility, Body scan, Mindful movement, Psychoeducation, Mindful listening, Mindful seeing, Mindful eating, Gratitude, Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), Expanding awareness, Autogenic Training.

AmDTx sessions tagged by Practice type

Intents:

The reasons we engage in mental health and performance training vary greatly, and are of course, personal. But typically our motivations include improving mental health and social skills by reducing stress, improving clarity, living fuller lives, and understanding the world around us. This includes understanding our own and other people's views and values, as well as our place in the universe. These Intents, as they are called in AmDTx, were compiled by MI's CEO Dr. Bechara Saab, and are listed below in no particular order:

Know Myself, Refresh, Relax, Time to Myself, Feel Good, Explore my Feelings, Enhance Perception, Enhance Compassion, Foster Empathy, Pursue Self-Actualisation, Enhance Creativity, Mindful Leadership, Manage Pain, Build Stress-Resilience, Reduce Anxiety Facilitate Sleep, Injury Recovery, Boost Energy, Enhance Curiosity, Increase Physical Endurance, Hone Focus, Build Discipline, Strengthen Mind-Body Connection, Find Balance.

AmDTx sessions tagged by Intent

Verbosity Measure:

This ‘tag’ is actually the ratio of silence to speech in a recorded audio session, expressed as a percentage. Thanks to Prof. Norm Farb at the University of Toronto for the suggestion of a verbosity measure. Norm is a world leader in the study of the neuroscience of human identity and emotion, and an advisor to MI.

AmDTx sessions tagged by Verbosity

Stay tuned for more in blog posts to come! 

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