This app uses AI and ASMR to create personalized meditations

Mindwell

Mindwell Meditation App.

• Mindwell, a new meditation app, says it combines "isochronic tones, solfeggio frequencies, and spoken guidance" to create 350 meditation tracks.
• Mindwell's flagship feature is MoodShift, a function meant to provide users with immediate help in beginning to alter one's mood.
• Mindwell launched an in-app AI predictive engine on Friday.
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Mindwell, a meditation app that layers tones and frequencies with spoken guidance, launched an in-app AI predictive engine on Friday.

Mindwell competes in the same meditation app space carved out by Headspace (launched in 2010 and valued at $320 million in 2017) and Calm (launched in 2012 and valued at $1 billion in February). According to the CDC, meditation practice among US adults tripled from 2012 to 2017. Mindwell first launched in June.

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Mindwell says it layers "isochronic tones, solfeggio frequencies, and spoken guidance" to create 350 meditation tracks offered to users as personalized daily meditations. The app isn't only about peaceful meditation; its tracks can be geared towards bolstering self-esteem, coping with illness, and managing anxiety, fear, and phobia. 

The app's flagship feature is MoodShift, a function meant to provide users with immediate help in beginning to alter their mood.

Clicking on the MoodShift tab within the app, users are brought to a rainbow screen with four quadrants: frustrated (anxious), energized (happy), discouraged (sad), and relaxed (peaceful). Users plots their current mood on the graph; next, they indicate which mood they would prefer to be in. Mindwell then recommends custom meditations for the user to listen to, with the goal of reaching the desired mindset through listening.

The app also has a suite of meditation tracks as part of its Sleep Lab, including ASMR tracks to relax users.

ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, refers to a tingling sensation that some people report hearing after listening to pleasantly soft, crinkling, or breathy sounds, like whispering. While not officially recognized by medical professionals, ASMR videos are popular, not to mention lucrative, on YouTube; and, they are often turned to as sleep aids. The YouTube account ASMR Darling has nearly 2.4 million subscribers; her most popular video "ASMR 20 triggers to help you sleep" has 32 million views.

Mindwell says its new AI predictive engine uses mood data to deploy personalized meditations. This data can be demographic (age, population), psychographic (mindsets, attitudes), or environmental (time of day, weather, current events). 

Mindwell

"I started many, many years ago as a composer and performer," Stewart Lane, Mindwell's head of mindfulness who also voices many of Mindwell's meditations, told Business Insider. "My interest was really looking at music, with how music affects the body because, particularly at the time (with) the kind of music in academies, the emphasis was on atonal music."

Lane said in order to listen to this atonal "jarring music, you kind of had to disengage from what the body was doing." Lane said he became "really interested in watching people's body language, becoming tight and closed even though intellectually they might have been enjoying what they were doing."

Lane's interest in the effect of music on the body played into the development of Mindwell, and the app's use of frequencies and tones layered with spoken guidance. 

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