BioBeats raises $2.28M for its platform to replace human stress therapists

BioBeats takes the data from wearables that monitor the health of employees and patients and puts it into a biometric machine-learning platform that delivers insights to healthcare providers or employers. It’s now raised $2.28 million led by White Cloud Capital, with participation from AXA Strategic Ventures and IQ Capital.

BioBeats’s stress-relieving app, Hear and Now, will be rolled out for both the consumer and “corporate wellness” market.

BioBeats was founded in 2013 by Dr. David Plans, Nadeem Kassam and David Morelli.

Using existing wearable devices and smartphones, the BioBeats platform gathers biometric information then designs a coaching programme around that person’s health goals.

For organisations, the platform can integrate with HR systems and productivity suites, delivering insights into workforce wellbeing and productivity. The application is currently running pilot programmes in major U.K. and U.S. companies.

They say existing services focus on either using questionnaire results or, like Ginger.io, gather data from smartphone movement sensors. Instead, BioBeats use AI to understand behaviour from smartphone and wearable sensors, concentrating primarily around heart rate and skin conductance (from which they can build an emotional picture of that stress), as well as looking at movement and behaviour.

Essentially speaking it takes all this data and replaces human therapists to tell someone if they are stressed, fatigued and near burnout. That gives them self-help mechanisms to cope.

Hear and Now (currently on iTunes store), produces visuals and music that adapt in real-time to data from wrist-worn wearables in order to coach the user in managing stress.

Apps like Calm, Pacifica, Happify and Serenita focus on the techniques, but BioBeats claims to take that data and do more with it.