It’s easy to get lost in a sea of objective data in science, often disregarding subjectivity. Not out of perceiving it as unimportant, rather it’s mostly because there are few ways to measure the subjective experience of a person in any kind of reliable or replicable way.
A psychologist might record subjective data by asking tailored questions to their patients and cross-referencing results over a fairly long period of time. The collected data can even be plotted on a graph in some cases. This is useful in traditional therapy but in the emerging field of immersive medicine, we’ll need something cohesive to measure a person’s subjective experience in real-time, in a way a computer can understand, especially when we wish to assist mental health.
What if social media platforms could guide its users toward content and people that are most supportive to their specific mental health needs each day? What if games could give tailored objectives/quests that support their neurological or psychological needs in real-time?
That’s a speculative question but it is the role of the SMILE Compass in Minds Join’s health-aware tech efforts. While this would indeed make a fantastic supplement for traditional therapy and the usual methods of recording data, we’re discovering (in these early stages) the depths of its power. The possibilities are becoming endless for technological applications.
SMILE Compass
Let me introduce you to the compass. SMILE stands for Subjective Mind Interface for Learning Everyone. It’s a quirky name to depict its ability to measure any person’s mentality in terms that can be processed by a computer easily. It doesn’t take a supercomputer AI to take 8 variables on a scale of 1-5 and determine an average. It also doesn’t require much processing power to generate a reliable response for each possible outcome for each of the 8 elements.
This makes the compass incredibly efficient as a mental navigation tool. On its most basic level, we can program some guidance to pull from an expertly written resource bank upon specific triggers/patterns. But it goes much further when we consider the possibility of data analysis and even AI assistance…
How does this fit into Immersive Medicine?
I feel that Immersive Medicine will benefit greatly from this. As all these wonderful companies and experts are developing fantastic DTx, they may be faced with the same problem we’ve always had. That the subjective experience of their users can’t be considered fully, without a reliable measuring tool. For example, if you were to play a VR game with therapeutic elements, you could just as easily fall into a state of stagnant complaining, even with all the neurological data and diagnoses. The game may have powerful insight and therapy overall, but in more specific scenarios it won’t know if you’re developing an avoidant pattern of gameplay due to your own subjective experience of annoyance, and it won’t know to nudge you back to a more observant, motivated state before continuing its therapeutics! This is a vague example of course, which is likely remedied in its own right already, but on the bigger picture you may see this as food for thought on how we might need to efficiently combat the vast array of scenarios that could arise in DTx gameplay.
Where we’re at now
We’re currently at a stage of design where we’ll need expert assistance and advice. We’ll be approaching investors soon, but we have only a few basic case studies so far, giving us our initial validation of its insight into the participants’ subjective experience. It will take much more in-depth data collection and analysis to really take it to the next level.
It’s a long road ahead, but if you find this interesting and would like to assist the trajectory of Minds Join, you’re welcome to reach out! Or if you just want to experience its insight for yourself, you can visit mindsjoin.com to try out the questionnaire and await my email response with your results!