INVENT 2022 Finalist Profile: Mind-Mapper Ltd
Founder name: Tara Nicholas and Naomi du Bois
What is your background?
I am a therapist and have a background in accountancy and project management with over 20 years of commercial experience working with SME’s in developing their business within previous roles in business banking and local government capacity. My co-founder Naomi is a research associate and a neurotech trial manager, with a background in psychology and neuroimaging.
My background provides the business development capacity as well as direct insights and empathy to our customer base and Naomi’s background brings a wealth of experience and technical expertise in psychology and managing neuroimaging trails using neurotech devices.
What inspired you to start your business?
Working as a therapist, I realised that the evidence base for talk-based therapies, grounded in neuroimaging research which demonstrates the changes in neural network function in the brain that correlates with the talk-therapy treatment – does not translate to the therapy environment.
In practice, the evidence for improved mental health relies solely on self-report assessments, which are therefore completely subjective and prone to bias. I noted that in the real-world talk-therapy environment, these functional changes in the brain, that underlie improved mental health and well-being, remain invisible – and this inspired me to find a solution that could bring the visible evidence for improved mental state out of the research lab and into the therapy practice that would improve the efficacy of therapy practice and thus reduce client time spent in therapy sessions which would have a significant impact on current waitlists as well as access to therapy treatment.
What problem are you solving?
We are giving therapists a tool that will provide objective, quantitative information about improvements their clients are making – in a graphic, therefore visible, easily interpretable format. This will solve the problem that they experience when trying to assess their clients’ progression – as they currently must rely on the client’s self-reported measure of improvement which is prone to bias, and therefore unreliable. Mind-Mapper will allow therapists to assess their clients’ progress quantifiably and thus, they can 1) change their methods of treatment if clients are not making improvements, and 2) provide their clients with a graphic display of improvements in their brain function over the course of their treatment.
On a personal level, this will provide clients with encouragement and on a practical level, having access to this quantifiable data this will open the doorway to reimbursable healthcare as well as reduce client time spent in therapy.
Who and where are your potential customers?
Mind-Mapper customers are talk-based therapists (such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Hypnotherapy therapists) – ideally, our first three customers would be:
The British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (British-based multi-disciplinary interest group for people involved in the practice and theory of cognitive behaviour therapy). (50,000+members)
The National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH). (2,000+members)
The Irish Council for Psychotherapy (This council represents eleven organisations and over 1,500 psychotherapists and is the National Awarding Organisation (NAO) of the European Certificate of Psychotherapy (ECP)
These are the primary associations across the UK and Ireland for therapists with combined access of more than 50,000 therapists across these regions.
What makes you different to other businesses in this field?
While there are many neuroimaging headsets on the market that use electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain activity – Mind-Mapper software will permit the first EEG headset to perform a functional connectivity analysis that does not require the user to have any neuroimaging expertise and it will be the first EG-based headset for use in therapy practice. Therefore Mind-Mapper will bring the ability to access objective quantifiable data bringing visibility to a currently invisible mental health states outside of the realms of clinical research. This will be a game changer for therapists as the provision of this objective data will improve treatment outcomes, shorten therapy time and open the gateway to reimbursable healthcare for therapy - all of which will positively impact wait times and mental health costs.
What do you think is the potential for your business?
The potential for mind-mapper is vast - once we have firmly established our primary customer market we aim to make available Mind-Mapper across various mental health treatments both in public and private sector and across multiple disorders so will not be limited to anxiety and depression. The use of the Mind-Mapper software will also have the capability to work across multiple neurotech headset devices and we have the capacity to introduce Mind-Mapper to a global market. We will aim to open Mind-Mapper well-being centres that will not only be a base for Mind-Mapper business operations it will also facilitate multiple therapy types where customers can visit the centre and receive custom treatments that will use the Mind-Mapper device to track progress of their mental health outcomes.
Where do you hope to be 5 years from now?
We hope to have successfully developed and launched our product to market and have firmly established ourselves within the neurotech market with views to exporting to Europe and US. Our overall arching aim in 5 years to have made a significant impact in increasing access to therapy and strong in roads in reducing wait times and costs in mental health care which we will always strive to do as making therapy more accessible to all is Mind-Mappers ultimate goal.
Tickets for the INVENT 2022 Awards Night are now on sale at invent22.co – Thursday 1st September at the ICC Waterfont Belfast