You might seriously want to reconsider the wording thereof. Even metaphorically, that sounds dangerously close to something the FDA might object to.
Here's some (quite old now) guidance: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ta97
I use that url to give some idea what process is used to assess and recommend computer based CBT.
If I were in this space, I'd start putting "not FDA evaluated" disclaimers on my site and marketing, and temper my promises right away.
Even if you're more effective, you not have to prove you're not a fraud.
This is unfortunately not rare at all and the 'hotter' a market seems the more of these BS artists will enter. In the end you have the same product and the same relationship with your customers but you're going to end up spending a lot of time differentiating yourself from the snake oil peddlers and the damage they can do is very real.
Good companies have gone under in the wake of the scandals triggered by the fakers. Playing a long game while your field is being torn up by people playing a short game is extremely frustrating.
Basically, Pepsi introduced a soda called Crystal Clear that was gaining momentum in the "clear soda" market. Coke wanted to sabotage the public perception, so they introduced "Tab Clear" and made it taste so terrible, that both products failed within 6 months. After that, no one wanted to touch clear soda for a while. (That is, until Coke reintroduced another drink called Sprite).
[1]http://thedailyjournalist.com/pen-and-pad/corporate-sabotage...
Like FB destroyed the trust of social networks, and ruined it for themself and their competitors? The same with chat with WhatsApp and other pseudo secure chat apps.
Help me understand something. So you link to papers where some kind of biofeedback is used to help with Anxiety, and then you claim that you do some kind of biofeedback as well, and therefore .... you are helping with Anxiety. Is that about right? Are those your "independent studies"?
Can you make that stronger claim? Is there a review article that we can Google?
The challenege is doing that without a large financial backing. It just takes longer.
However, we don't have funding at this point (partially because we want to avoid Luminosity's fate of being tied to growth), so we are just focusing on getting a fully developed product that some psychologists we are working with would use.
With TBI, the issue is often connectivity between parts of the brain, and that can be measured as EEG Coherence.
I agree with lettergram and others, that without feedback these type braingames don't really do anything.
Disclosure: I used to work for them.
1. Diet - Eat reasonably well.
2. Physical Exercise - Can be as simple as walking around the neighborhood; just stay active.
3. Stress Relief - Stress wears you down; get zen when you can.
4. Socialization - Just being around other people helps you stay sharp.
5. Brain Exercise - Different and varied challenges. Crosswords, puzzles, board games, etc. all help. Something that's complex and engages your long-term planning engine is great: she likes strategy games (like Starcraft or Age of Empires). Basically, find ways to put your brain to work. And like physical exercise, variance is key.
The problem with Lumosity and #5 is that any "improvement" you see isn't improvement in mental acuity, but efficiencies in repetition.
Thanks again!
" According to the CDC one in five Americans have ADHD, anxiety, or depression.
Impacting productivity, focus, and mood.
We can help, with ThinkSuite!"
Chemicals can't even help me, how would ThinkSuite? If I could cure this crap with a site, I would, but we can't.
[1] http://synaptitude.me/blog/neurofeedback-in-200-words/
Essentially, we can help cope with the issues by helping you identify bad practices. That's it. Turns out many of us don't realize when we start losing attention, or feeling sad. We just suddenly realize we do feel bad. The idea is to make you more aware of what makes you feel bad/lose attention, when you start feeling that way so you can better control it.
Here are some links to some studies (more are coming out soon):
[2] (2009) http://eeg.sagepub.com/content/40/3/180.short [3] (2009) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.... [4] (1995) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8801245
The end goal of our system is to use it in combination with other therapies, drugs, and medical professionals to determine the effectiveness of a therapy/drug on an individual and improve it. Coupled with that we can provide better coping skills, and our own therapy called neurofeedback (as mentioned).
It's been good overall!
Probably less helpful to others is my supportive wife. I probably drive her to distraction at times, which feels awful as I don't mean to. But she forgives me and ensures I don't forget to take my medicine, which is unbelievably important. That's obviously not helpful if you aren't in a significant relationship though.
Wish I had more words of wisdom. I'm still working it all out myself to be honest. I think it's a lifetime struggle, but worthwhile fighting.
That doesn't follow. Drugs aren't automatically better or more effective than non-drug therapies.
Your statement is illogical.
FWIW I'm making no claim here as to the efficacy of either proven or unreviewed therapies just calling out unsound reasoning.
[1] http://synaptitude.me/blog/neurofeedback-in-200-words/
Essentially, we can help people identify bad practices and create better ones.
Turns out many of us don't realize when we start losing attention, or feeling sad. We just suddenly realize we do feel bad. The idea is to make you more aware of what makes you feel bad/lose attention, then you can control it (to a degree).
The end goal of our system is to use it in combination with other therapies, drugs, and medical professionals to determine the effectiveness of a therapy/drug on an individual and improve it. Coupled with that we can provide better coping skills, and our own therapy called neurofeedback (as mentioned).
Is this an actual product you have out in production now, or is it still in the planning stages so far? I would be very interested in further developments. I am a Software Engineer by trade, so please let me know if you would like any beta testers.
Cheers and thank you!
PS: You finally got me to register an account here ;)
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and opt for c). Sorry to pop your bubble, but your startup is not going to work out in the current form. All I see from your website, is a company founded by three students who read some papers about EEG and want to sell me a treatment for ADHD and depression using home made beta software and a consumer grade! EEG headset.
At least in my book, this is flat out quackery and one of the reason that Neurofeedback is still seen in many places as 'alternative medicine' and does not have a stellar reputation although it has been shown as effective in a couple clinical trials.
First of all don't even try to conduct a survey on treatment efficacies to make up for missing data on your own website. Please leave this to clinical trials.
Second, you compare your pricing model with allegedly professional Neurofeedback providers, by actually not offering any in-person session and non-medical EEG devices? Is this really not a joke?
Let's just ignore for now the fact that consumer grade EEG headsets don't even offer the precision you need for proper Neurofeedback training. e.g. Emotiv epoc offers 14 channels@128Hz, where real EEG hardware usually has at least twice the sampling rate, a greater bandwidth, and 19-21 channels (up to 256 in research).
Most importantly, how do you even think your treatment works? You can't just look for any occurrences of "slow-wave power" and then tell your patient that he should pay more attention now. That's not how any of this works.
You need to identify signal signatures in response to standardized stimuli. In patients and "healthy" controls. You need to account for the whole spectrum of any mental disorder. Even though they are usually defined as in the DSM as "one disorder" with couple of symptoms, on the individual level there is not much commonality left among all the people with the "same disorder". So you need to "reassemble" the disorder bottom-up, by clustering different sub-types based on biological markers (EEG profiles). Then you got to match them to their clinical diagnosis. If you have any meaningful data left by then, you might be able to identify a small set of markers that exhibit a high predictability, that a given patient belongs to a presumed subtype. Existing commercial databases are of the order of 1K-4K healthy controls and hundreds of patients. Then you can start a training using those markers. Now comes the fun part of assessing the clinical efficacy of your new marker set. You'll get a whole bunch of sub-types like high frontal delta/low dorsal alpha/low beta, high alpha/low beta, or low theta/high dorsal alpha/"higher" frontal beta, etc. ... each of which has to be trained accordingly.
I really don't see how you want to recreate all of this on consumer EEG hardware. And if you opt for the current medical hard&software/databases: then what's your value proposition? How do you want to beat current model, of a licensed practitioner guided by a supervisory psychologist? Because this setup gives you the efficacy of the literature and it costs a hell lot of money.
Please don't sell any "treatment" that you can't provide. I can understand that it is a very tempting and huge market: "According to the CDC one in five Americans have ADHD, anxiety, or depression.", if you really want to make money there, go to big pharma, if you actually want to "cure it", go to research. But I really don't think, that selling this quackery is going to benefit anyone.
disclaimer: this is neither my field, nor do I have any stakes in that particular game, just happen to know some people doing actual research on this matter.
I have three small kids, my youngest, before she could even speak, was able to pic up an iPhone, unlock it and browse to various apps including camera, gallery and netflix and take pics, view them or select a movie to watch. Yet she couldn't yet formulate a word.
So given this, I assume that there is a great deal that an iPhone like device could be leveraged upon to accomplish greater learning...
How would you propose this be done with the ubiquity of such devices at this time?
I have some theories but I'd like to hear your position first.
Just don't be seduced by the dark side. Be honest with how accurate your tools are. The results will speak for themselves.
Seems pretty interesting though, signed up for Early Access.
\ find graphics challenging, but narrative is easy to keep track of.
\* remember events and experiences well, not so much facts and figures.
\* get unproductively competitive over desirable assignments.
And so forth x1,000,000. This is all the stuff that gets glossed over by strong AI proponents, and I think pushes it way out into the 2-300 year timespan the way we're going now.
I think that strong AI most likely to be a materials science breakthrough.
Please don't spam me with updates :P. Just awaiting access to Beta.
Thanks for signing up!
I've been working on a startup: http://synaptitude.me/ (demo is old)
Essentially, we can do some of what Luminosity claims (and have independent studies to prove it). Every time someone goes: "Oh it's just like Lumosity" I have to go through and explain the difference. My wife has a degree in neuroscience and I minored in BioE, and we both just HATE Lumosity. Their misleading ads seriously damaged the public perception, and there is no way they can assess anything they claim (if it is even possible).
That's pretty much why my startup is working on our applications. We feel there is a market and can definitely help people, but just "brain games" (without feedback/guidance) don't do anything.