SXSW Startups: Healium
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 5, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Augmented and Virtual Reality, which will pitch at 3:30 pm Saturday, March 9, Healium is the world’s first mindfulness channel powered by the user’s brain and heart rate. The biometrically controlled VR and AR stories heal themselves via data from the user’s wearables. In published studies, Healium has been shown to reduce moderate anxiety and increase feelings of positivity in as little as four minutes. It’s a portable digital chill pill that gives the user virtual superpowers.
We checked in with CEO Sarah Hill to learn more about how Healium works.
Tell us more about the benefits of Healium and can you describe neuromeditation?
My co-founder, Dr. Jeff Tarrant, wrote the book on neuromeditation. Put simply, neuromeditation is the application of brain-based principles to the meditation practice. Think of the Healium experiences as immersive storytelling meets neurofeedback. We’re harnessing the data from the user’s wearables and using it as a remote control to heal or change virtual worlds. In decades of research, the gamma asymmetry brain pattern has been shown to be associated with feelings of positivity, loving-kindness, joy and appreciation.
Frontiers in Psychology and the Journal of Neuroregulation both published studies on Healium’s ability to reduce moderate anxiety and increase gamma asymmetry and feelings of positivity in as little as four minutes. Here’s a deeper dive into how gamma asymmetry works with Healium.
Do you see a future for Healium in which more biometrics are involved for data analysis?
Yes. Currently the Muse brain-sensing headband for brain patterns and the Apple watch for heart rate work as inputs to power Healium. In the future, we would love to add more wearables that track respiration, galvanic skin conductance, and other biomarkers for stress.
Your product entails an interface that is part computer, part brain. How much of the user experience is computerized?
We call it “youware,” a human layer between wearables’ hardware and software. The user’s biometrics are the inputs that power the experience. Once inside our apps, you can choose from more than a dozen experiences. For Healium pro users, a new piece of content is added to the platform every 60 days. The navigation menus inside our app aren’t currently biometrically controlled, just the individual experiences. As BCI and other biometric navigation tools get more advanced, we look forward to the day when you’ll be able to operate Healium’s menus completely hands-free…just with your mind or heart rate or respiration.
What are your goals for Healium in 2019?
Lean into leveraging the AR cloud and building our data story. We’d like to equip every Honor Flight hub in the nation with VR goggles so aging and terminally ill veterans who can’t travel to Washington, DC to see their memorials can experience them in VR. We currently have a list of 35 veterans waiting for VR goggles so they can use Healium software to see their memorials as part of a free virtual tour program we built called Honor Everywhere. It is our company’s social purpose. To date, thousands of veterans have had the chance to virtually visit their memorials via Honor Everywhere.
What are you hoping to get out of attending SXSW 2019?
I’m looking forward to seeing Amy Lameyer’s session on AR/VR’s impact on music. In addition, I enjoy watching the companies pitch at the competition. It allows you to peer around the corner to see what’s ahead.
Healium is currently based in Columbia, MO. Tell us about the startup ecosystem there.
Great companies come from anywhere. Columbia is located between St. Louis and Kansas City in the “silicon prairie.” Living in the Midwest and building a business here, I can do it for a fraction of the cost, which lowers our cost of goods, operating expenses and stretches our investors’ dollars. I have literally a two-minute commute to work. Beyond cost and time savings, there is a rich digital storytelling ecosystem here anchored by the Missouri School of Journalism, the world’s oldest Journalism school. Brilliant creatives, medicine and engineering minds come to work and study at Mizzou, which affords StoryUP a unique opportunity to collaborate as we build new therapeutic use cases for media.
How and when did your team come together?
My co-founder, Dr. Jeff Tarrant, was my husband’s business partner when they had a psychology practice together. More than 10 years ago, Jeff wrote a neurofeedback protocol for me to help me sleep. I was a burned-out television news reporter who for decades had consumed a daily diet high in negative fiber until it will make me sick.
Ultimately, I got out of the news business for my health and started an XR company that at the time was giving virtual tours to a group of aging veterans who were no longer able to physically travel to see their memorials in Washington, DC. After dozens of visits with these veterans, we noticed our experiences appeared to have a calming effect on them and their families. They would take deeper breaths when they had on the headset. Their body posture would soften.
I asked Jeff if he could do a brain map to discover how on a physiological level did our experiences affect users. When Jeff shared the before/after photo of someone’s brain immediately before and after Healium, we realized we needed to team up to study how to make our experiences even more therapeutic.
If your team members weren’t involved in building Healium, what would they be doing?
Jeff would be meditating. He wrote the book on neuromeditation and is an expert on brain-based principles for mindfulness. Ricky Rockley, our XR Design lead, is a phenomenal artist who likes to sketch and create outside of a game engine. Kyle Perry might be doing something space related as he worked previously with NASA.
Looking at the entire tech industry, what trend is your team most excited about?
Beyond the AR cloud, we’re excited about brain-computer interface hardware and other biometric inputs coming to VR/AR headsets. With the pioneering work that hardware companies like Neurable, Emteq and Looxid Labs are doing, we’re excited about sensors being baked into more places. Wearable fabrics will also enable content creators to move beyond external hardware and more easily leverage the power of the user’s feelings.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
