eQuoo - the digital mental health app

by Startacus Admin

The lowdown on the gaming app, eQuoo that helps users build their emotional fitness and thereby help fight their mental illness...

With the tried and tested method of gamification, sub-clinical, award-winning emotional fitness game eQuoo is PsycApps’ way of finding a way to get people suffering from depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses intrinsically motivated to stick to therapeutic digital programmes.

Many mental health issues include a lack of motivation and cognitive impairment as symptoms, so using gaming, the reward system therein, and AI to keep people motivated is the way in which this startup intends to better and even save lives.

PsycApps has partnered up with US-based game development company Collision Studios to build a game that helps you fight your mental illness. It does this by teaching you a little about psychology, and taking you through stories - sci-fi, fantasy, romance - in which you choose your path, your actions, your reactions.

The goal is for you to use emotional intelligence skills that the game teaches you to make it to the best outcome of these games, and allow that knowledge to better sink in for use in the real world.

The app has been reviewed with top scores by ORCHA, the UK’s leading health-app assessment platform, which helps assure users that not only is their data safe, but that “a suitably qualified professional or organisation was involved in the Apps development” and that it has been “clinical trials or similar testing to demonstrate its 'real world' effectiveness”.

PsycApps’ CEO, Silja Litvin is a clinical psychologist with a specialty in depression and anxiety, as well as systemic psychology, but it is always comforting to have an unbiased third party like ORCHA review these things.

It is worth noting that, although eQuoo underwent a 5-week, 3-arm randomized controlled trial with over 350 participants to prove their claims that eQuoo enhances player’s mental well-being, it is not to be used for diagnosis or treatment.

That said, eQuoo is the only game in the NHS’s EMIS app library, meaning that doctors can now refer their patients to eQuoo to improve their mental health and well-being. Apps listed on the platform have been evaluated under NHS Digital’s digital assessment questions (DAQ) and assessed for their clinical safety, data protection, security, and usability. They closed their seed funding round in December, and we think we’ll be seeing more of this app as they work to expand its use outside of the UK.

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Published on: 15th January 2020