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The Air Force is using this mental health service to help with stress

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The pandemic has been stressful for everyone, and that includes members of the military. In the past two years, suicide rates among active military service members have gone up 15%. The military has long offered resilience training and access to therapy, but in 2020, the Air Force decided to take a different course of action. It began offering an innovative mental health platform called NeuroFlow to make care more accessible and to track how members were doing, so it could intervene if it seemed someone was a risk to themselves. “It is known throughout the mental health community that the Department of Defense is experiencing a spike in suicides at an alarming rate,” says Durel Williams, a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Air Mobility Command, where he’s responsible for 2,800 security forces members. Of those, 600 have signed up for NeuroFlow, which tracks fitness, sleep, well-being, loneliness, depression, alcohol use, and anxiety. It also offers tools for emotional regulation, like guided meditation, journaling, and video and written resources. All of this data becomes part of a user’s electronic health record. Artificial intelligence will then alert clinical staff about people who seem at risk. So far, 12 people have been flagged as at-risk, and in one instance a person was stopped from harming themselves. [Photo: courtesy of NeuroFlow] Military members can sign up for the app anonymously. Their data is also shared only with healthcare providers, not management. If they are flagged for any reason, a care coordinator gives them a call to check in on them and see if they need more help. Before this pilot with NeuroFlow, the military offered mental health care through traditional talk therapy and resilience training. Williams has been working as a resiliency trainer for the last 10 years, giving people tools to help them rebound from a difficult situation. However, accessing care is complicated. In order to see a therapist, service members are removed from duty, which is extremely stigmatizing. However, Williams says, it is a necessary step. “Their duty is to secure and protect, and they are on an arming roster where every day they’re expected to be able to pick up their weapon and go to work. Read More …

Want to make healthcare cheaper? Bring the hospital to you

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At first blush, the idea of moving most healthcare from hospitals and medical offices to people’s living rooms seems impossible. Of course, once upon a time, so did getting your groceries without leaving your couch. Or voting. Or attending college. Or talking to your doctor. Or virtually any of the activities in our daily lives that used to require going somewhere and doing something. There’s not many silver linings to COVID-19, but the emergence and acceptance of virtual healthcare is certainly one of them. Patients and doctors are now far more comfortable interacting over video or text, discussing intimate healthcare issues, prescribing treatment and conducting the follow up, all without anyone having to go anywhere. No one with a fever prefers climbing into a car or squeezing onto a crowded subway to sit in a germ-infested waiting room only to eventually have a doctor ask the same standardized questions that could have fit into a text Read More …

This millennial women’s health brand is expanding with a controversial partner

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Carolyn Witte says she’s building the future of women’s healthcare. Her company, called Tia, is a beefed up primary care clinic with gynecological services and mental healthcare that’s been called a “ gynecologist for the self-care generation. ” Now, it’s partnering with Catholic healthcare system CommonSpirit in order to go national. Tia doesn’t currently perform elective abortion or in vitro fertilization, two services the relationship would bar. But the partnership begs the question: Can Tia be the future of women’s healthcare if it partners with entities that actively limit women’s health choices? Carolyn Witte [Photo: courtesy of Tia] Tia, which Witte cofounded in 2017 with Felicity Yost, offers a blend of primary care, gynecological care, nutrition, acupuncture, and mental health services. It charges an annual fee of $150 in addition to the cost of services, the latter of which is largely covered by insurance. Its services include IUD insertion and removal, colposcopies for abnormal pap smears, myomectomies, and biopsies Read More …

This iPhone app lets anybody mint an NFT for anything—for free

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Musicians and visual artists have long registered their work with the U.S. Copyright Office to prove it’s theirs. But doing so is really little more than a person in a government office “witnessing” that a creation is associated with a person’s name on a certain date. And the process takes weeks or months to complete. In the 21st century, creation happens on digital platforms. It happens far faster than ever before, and in many ways. Inspiration for a vocal line or a beat can happen spontaneously during a TikTok duet, for example. A GIF can be created on a phone and uploaded to social networks. It’s a good thing, then, that the blockchain can also “witness” the creation—and the creator—of a digital thing, and record it for perpetuity. A new, free app called S!ng lets pretty much anybody do this in a few seconds by minting an NFT ( nonfungible token ) of a work on the Ethereum blockchain. An NFT is a type of cryptographic token that signifies true ownership of a digital asset, such as a piece of digital artwork. Creators can upload images (JPEG, BMP, or TIFF files) or audio (WAV, MP3, MIDI, PTX, PTF, or M4A) to the S!ng app, or record audio directly via the phone’s microphone. Once creators have minted an NFT for their work, it can be sold or licensed to others online if there’s a market for it. Read More …

Apple sidesteps bias debate by leaving Siri’s gender up to you

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For a long time, Apple’s Siri voice assistant used a female voice. It was originally the voice of the voice-over artist (and former Roy Orbison backup singer) Susan Bennett. Later, Apple began adding both male and female voice options that the user could select, and in some countries the default was male. But in the U.S., the default has always been female–until now. In a new beta version of iOS, Apple leaves it up to users who are setting up Siri to decide what gender and accent they’d like in their assistant, reports TechCrunch ‘s Matthew Panzarino. This move could deftly sidestep the debate about the inherent gender bias that the default-female Siri has stirred up in the past. (The UN called the default-female Siri “sexist” in a 2019 report called “ I’d blush if I could .”) Why have Siri and other assistants defaulted to a female voice? Fast Company ‘s Katharine Schwab explored the subject in a  2019 article . Among other reasons, AI assistants may have originally used female voices because the available synthesized female voices were of higher sound quality. But that hasn’t been true for years Read More …