May is mental health awareness month which makes it the perfect time to talk about an idea that I have for a deluxe fitness tracker that would track our state of mind. For now this idea is purely conceptual. I have no idea how to make such a product. But I think the idea has merit. Primarily because of how under-served the mental health market is. In fact, according to a recent survey, over 80% of respondents believed that there should be more options available for childhood mental health services. This on top of recent news that as many as 1 in 5 Americans are suffering from depression.
So, if we’re basically all depressed and full of unresolved teenage angst wouldn’t it make sense to leverage technology in order to tackle this problem head on? Fitness trackers are great in their own right but counting steps and measuring heart rates is only scratching the surface of what a health monitoring app ought to do. There’s a ton of other information that would be insanely valuable to know about. Such as, everything that’s going on between our ears.
Think of it like a mood ring of sorts. Just by looking at this tracker you could quickly find out what’s bothering you. You may think this kind of information would be obvious. That you would be in touch with your feelings and know when something is off but that’s not always the case. You could be secretly depressed without even realizing it. Your endorphins and adrenaline rushes masking what’s really effecting you beneath the surface. Case in point: you receive some bad news. People ask how you’re doing. You put on a brave face and say everything is fine. You keep up appearances. But truth be told, you’re really hurting on the inside. Wouldn’t it be great then if you had a mental health tracker to tell you exactly how much you were hurting? If you could tell, by looking at a particular measurement, if you really were fine or if you really ought to talk to someone ASAP before doing irreparable harm to your psyche.
Emotions aside, perhaps this tracker could also monitor everything else going on inside your brain. If it could measure your memory capacity, your spatial awareness, your powers of deduction, your reflex time, your tiredness, your general mental aptitude, etc. For instance, imagine using this information to make the potential life-saving decision to not drive home late at night because of warning signs indicating that you would be at risk of falling asleep behind the wheel. Or imagine making the decision to read a book over watching TV because your visual cortex was already dangerously overworked for the day while the logic and reasoning part of your brain wasn’t getting enough attention. Or better yet, imagine studying for a test and finding out when you could stop, because you found out that the memory stores in your brain were filled up and that studying more wouldn’t make any more of a difference.
Just think about how much time we could be saving, how many better decisions we could be making. Just think about what this could mean for our society, if instead of snapping at one another, we could know ahead of time that we need to start calming down because our rage quotient was trending up.
All of that and more may one day be possible. All thanks to a fitness tracker that monitors the activity of our biggest muscle of all: the brain.
Is a fitness tracker for mental health the Greatest Idea Ever?
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