Your AI Guru
Overall Idea Rating: 3.1/5
Financial feasibility: ROI
User adoption & retention
Technical feasibility
Growth capability
The Initial Thought
From my experience, Ironman triathletes, diet fastidious folks, yogi’s & spiritual warriors, startup CEO’s & social butterfly’s all have something in common - they seem not all that happy and I know this because I’ve been most of those.
In our pursuit of ‘our version of perfection’ and achievement we tend to over stimulate certain parts of our life (eg, work or exercise) to compensate for other things that come less easy (eg, helping others or self connection).
In my opinion, happiness is very subjective and personal. It has many complex, overlapping factors and yes, while your diet & exersize routine do support the release of happiness hormones there are many other subjective factors including to social activity, pursuing a purpose or a mission, giving back, feeling valued, being challenged, creating things with our hands, laughing etc that cannot be measured with a Garmin.
It is the balance of these that helps us cultivate joy in life - for ourselves and for others! We are all so different that I am not convinced there is a one size fits all to happiness.
Despite happiness being subjective & personal, I also believe that there are certain pillars that need to be filled but the amount in each pillar is different for everyone.
The Problem
Quite simply, most people intuitively know when they ‘need to exersize more’, or ‘ spend more time with friends’ or ‘eat healthily’, but we don’t even start or commit past 2 months because we strive for perfection, when all we need is a little more in each cup rather than trying to fill one.
There is no single solution in the market today that helps measure & balance these three key pillars - Mind | Body | Spirit - mainly because it is very difficult to measure such subjective topics. I am fully aware that the ‘mind, body, spirit’ element can sound quite ‘woo-woo’, but there is quite simply irrefutable data from countless studies that correlate the balance between these 3 pillars are vitality, longevity and happiness.
There are plenty [Billion Dollar] applications that measure hard body data [Sleep, heart rate, HRV, exercise & calories burnt] or [Diets, food or calorie intake etc] and some do both, but not many. There are health and wellness applications focussing on the mental and spiritual pillars [Breathing, meditation, mindfulness etc]. Similarly, there are digital psychologists, tele-doctors and the like which are equally useless as each other since they have no prior information or data.
Health, happiness and vitality is achieved through understanding your own body, mind & personality and ensuring you get enough of each pillar in life or reducing certain elements that take from your ability to fill other important pillars.
Fortunately, with the rise of *AI (NLP & LLM’s mainly) we are now in a better position to begin to measure and quantify these subjective behaviours, and I believe the best way to receive this information is through a single daily (or multiple) voice note to your reflecct app.
*AI - Meaning Natural Language Processing (NLP) & Large Language Models (LLM’s) and Generative AI.
The Solution
Reflecct is a mobile app that helps you balance your body, mind spirit connection by combining in your daily ‘hard’ body data from your wearables, and your ‘soft’ subjective data from a daily voice, video or text input, otherwise known as a ‘Reflection’ and recommends ways in which you can balance yourself relative to your own bespoke personality and body.
The goal is for users to reflect on their day and/or life via a simple voice note each day and for the system to understand you and recommend ways in which you can improve your life through the balance of mind, body & spirit. I also believe strongly that the daily act of speaking your mind into a voice note will bring many auxiliary benefits, similar to what you would get from speaking to a friend or psychologist.
The information from your reflection will be heard and organised into its relevant Pillars and Sub-pillars and interpreted relative to the tone, day, time and previous reflections. The AI model will then combine this reflection with your hard data ie: heart rate, sleep, exersize etc and recommend to you ways to balance yourself. When joining, we will also collect a personality assessment so we have a broad idea of your character type which will then help determine how much of each Pillar you need. Ie: some people need more social time than others.
For example.
I open my reflect app at 8pm after a decent day, tap on the voice note recorder and start talking:
Today was a pretty good day until recently. I woke up around 6am as usual, had a big glass of water, a shower and did my normal 15 minutes of breathing exersizes. Then I journaled as usual for 45 minutes, I couldn’t really connect this morning for some reason. I had eggs on toast for breakfast and got started at work. Work has been extremely rewarding recently, mainly because we’ve closed some interesting new deals. I still feel though that should we win more projects we won’t be able to cope with the pressure and this concerns me. After work I went to kickboxing, which really helped clear my mind, it felt rewarding. For dinner I had a spaghetti and watched tv and played on social media until now. I’m a bit pissed off because it don’t feel that I get anything from social media but I still go on it for hours in end. This I need to fix somehow, such a good day ruined by a bad ending. Close reflection!
In the system design we break up ‘the message’ into various Pillars. The purpose is to balance our Pillars and Sub-pillars and, based on your personality and character type to ensure the Pillars channels are adequately filled.
1. Mind (Pillar)
A. Learn / educate (Sub-Pillar)
B. Work / purpose
C. Hobbies / activities
2. Body
A. Exersize
B. Diet
3. Spirit
A. Faith
B. Social connection
C. Self connection
D. Helping others
The system would organise food and drink into the ‘diet’ sub-pillar, kick boxing into the ‘exersize’ sub-pillar, and so forth. The system would then take your hard data from your wearable ie: heart rate, sleep, exersize, etc over the day, mixed with your voice tone and other variables. The idea is that once it understands your and your habits, successes and challenges it will prompt you more effectively
For example, after your reflection it might say:
“you didn’t feel good after your last social connection on your phone, you are a bit low on personal social connection, so in the next week, try find some time to connect with some friends and family” or
“painting is a good way to replace time on your phone, try order a paint by numbers and give it a go” or
“you seem to have a full cup on your social time, try spend some quiet time with yourself this week” etc.
In the future there could be options to integrate products and services that line up with the channels so they can get easy access to what they are missing. Ie: mediation classes, personal trainer, running clubs nearby, pottery classes etc. anything that encourages reaching flow and achieving balance more easily.
We also want to stay away from being a ‘digital psychologist’ as that is a very deep and complex area that is arguably to subjective to measure any progress.
Key Challenges
Lack of training data:
LLM’s and other AI models need huge amounts of training data in order to provide viable recommendations. This is not as easy to collect given that there is not a large database of human feelings and hard data.
Competition:
Given Apple’s new development of Journal and ownership of Apple Health, Googles acquisition of Fitbit and the overwhelming number of tech companies investing in wearables, AI and healthcare it is only a matter of time before a more advanced, integrated solution is developed.
Basic versions of this are already available in the GPT store.
Privacy:
Sharing your heart and soul to an AI has obvious security and privacy risks.
Natural tendancy toward psychology
This app is not developed to be a psychologist, but as people use it, the industry may request that its ‘advice’ is based on scientific principals.
