CompanionMx launches its mobile mental health monitoring solution, Companion. A spinoff from its parent company, Cogito Corp., CompanionMx developed the Companion monitoring system to address the growing demand for better and more scalable evidence-based mental health.
CompanionMx leverages clinically validated artificial intelligence technology developed under the Cogito name to provide key metrics of mental health. These metrics are derived from Companion's unique acoustic biomarker — a proprietary analysis of voice features — and several behavioral biomarkers from smartphone metadata.
The system allows patients to speak into their phones and captures data from daily use. The voice and behavioral data from the phone app is analyzed to create a measure of mental health. Clinicians can use insights from the data via the Companion dashboard to respond sooner to warning signs and have more effective conversations with their patients. Recent randomized control trials have shown positive results in patients suffering from depression and bipolar disorders, among others.
According to Dr. David K. Ahern, Director of Digital Behavioral Health and Informatics Research Program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “Having sophisticated, built-in sensors in our pockets creates opportunities for observing how we live that didn’t exist 10 years ago.” Companion was developed and clinically validated through funding from the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Veterans Administration and the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). The system is built with the ability to include additional capabilities for screening for mental health disorders in a general population, personalized safety planning, coping skills modules, stress reduction, and telehealth as well as providing clinical scales and surveys to patients remotely. The core symptoms traced by Companion data are validated against the gold standard Structured Clinical Interview for DSM (SCID). For more information, visit CompanionMx.