CompanionMx Launches with Mobile Mental Health Solution

CompanionMx, Inc., a digital health company, today announced its entrance into the market through the launch of 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.

Mental health disorders are the leading cause of disease burden globally. One in five people in the U.S. suffer from mental health disorders – costing U.S. businesses $105B annually in lost productivity and fueling the need for clinically validated solutions that enable proactive intervention. 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.

“It has been such an honor to witness the hard work of this team culminate in a company and product that will help the patients who need it most,” said Joshua Feast, CEO, Cogito, who joins the Board of Directors for the new company.

The Companion 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 of the Companion system in patients suffering from depression and bipolar disorders, among others.

“Having sophisticated, built-in sensors in our pockets creates opportunities for observing how we live that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” according to Dr. David K. Ahern, Director of Digital Behavioral Health and Informatics Research Program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a co-principal investigator of a recent clinical trial using Companion. “The Companion system gives us continuous objective data on patient mental states and concomitant behaviors alongside their daily activities, which allows us to see patterns that help guide proactive patient care.”

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).

“We have been fortunate to mature under an established leader in using artificial intelligence and voice features, developed with some of the brightest minds in healthcare and technology,” said Sub Datta, CEO, CompanionMx. “As we continue to build this digital vital sign for mental health, we are committed to improving the lives of patients through data-driven insights and proactive care plans.”

For more information, visit www.companionmx.com.

About CompanionMx
CompanionMx, Inc. is a digital health technology company with a proven platform for proactive mobile mental health monitoring for better clinical outcomes. Born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and clinically validated at Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals and multiple Veterans Affairs clinics, the Companion system uses active monitoring of voice and passive monitoring of other smartphone metadata to continuously produce acoustic and behavioral biomarkers that predict core symptoms of mood and anxiety disorders. The software has been used by more than 1,500 patients and scores of behavioral health care clinicians and researchers. CompanionMx is headquartered in Boston. Learn more at www.companionmx.com.

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