The health tech industry has always been of a great interest for startups. However, the mental health industry, being a part of it, is experiencing a dramatic increase in interest among people and businesses since 2012. The main driver behind this growth is the fact that people are becoming more open about their own mental health problems and about the problems of their friends and family members as well. This has led to an increased demand for information on how to cope with these issues, which in turn has led to a greater demand for solutions like therapy, medication and digital mental health tools.

Bitsens came to the health tech industry via active participation in the EU’s Horizon 2020 MedTech R&D project, called CAPABLE (Cancer Patients Better Life Experience). The role of the company in terms of this project was to develop its mobile app user interface (UI) for patients and caregivers together with a web dashboard for healthcare professionals. Besides Bitsens, the project consortium includes 11 business and academic member partners, including IBM Israel, leading hospitals for cancer care from the Netherlands and Italy, one of the oldest Universities in the world (University of Pavia) and some other top Universities. Active participation in research and development together with professors from Stanford University, University of Pavia, University of Haifa will make possible to predict the development of cancer disease by means of AI modelling. 

Our next step was creating a new type of health tech apps: Heart Rate tracker app with breathing exercises (IOS, Android), Days Counter app with positive affirmations (IOS, Android), an art therapy coloring game Color It (Android). Our fresh Mentalio AI-powered mood-tracking mobile application came into life in 2022, combining such tools as breathing practice, mood-tracking and journaling, stress tests, guided affirmations, statistics and education materials (IOS).

International networking and cooperation along with the active development of our own products led us to the idea of mental health tech hub community creation. Today, as of October 2022, the outcome is the start of our Mental Health Tech blog. The platform of the blog is LinkedIn (Mental.Tech on LinkedIn) with plans to expand it to other social media and platforms.

In this blog, we cover the following range of topics:

• Tech Startups in the mental health industry
• New products reviews (software, hardware)
• Top charts and lists of interesting apps in certain domains, connected to mental health (games, mood-tracking, task-planning, breathing, meditation etc. )
• Insights from startup owners 

Stay tuned!