A conversation about gamifying CBT.

So my name is Mamduh and I'm the CEO and founder of Zeeds. What we are trying to do is to help increase efficiency of cognitive behavioral therapy. So CBT within a software platform.

I’m assuming this one is not an easy task. It might demand a certain amount of software or knowledge. So what is your key innovation here?

We have a quite deep understanding of CBT. I am myself a psychologist. And I have people quite senior in psychology as well within the team. Our key innovation is that we have developed a user friendly and gamified application that you can prescribe as a homework assignment. For the patient it looks like they are sort of growing plants and interacting with a virtual garden. What they are really doing is that they are filling in a bunch of otherwise very boring paper forms.

And what we do with that data is we backtrack it in a web portal and showcase it in patient profiles to the psychologists. The analog way of doing CBT requires a lot of analogue paper based work, and the adherence to these assignments is very low. So we're trying to make it more enjoyable for the patient, and get the therapist all the important live data to have a more transparent and effective view of what the patient is actually doing between sessions.

So it is basically an innovative way to use the CBT? You're taking the cognitive behavioral therapy and you put in gamification to make an easier user experience.

Yes, I would say so. It is a more rewarding experience of filling in and checking your data compared to paper assignments. The flow has this gamification aspect, but it also does some simple psycho education so that the therapist does not have to repeat certain formulations because the app can sort of do the manual easy labor of the change process.

And for those of us that are not psychologists and do not know that much about CBT, what would you say are the main key takeaways of CBT?

So CBT is a broad framework of different types of therapeutic models, let's say the most evidence based gold standard of mental health treatment. It generally is quite hypothesis driven and statistical in its approach. And a lot of the DSM five, which is the broad diagnostic manual which you use for common disorders, is built upon a CBT framework. So thoughts, actions and behaviors are linked in certain chains which reward each other.

And by manipulating rewards. These changes can make people change their behaviors, moods or thoughts in more intuitive, or in better ways let's say. Specifically, what Zeeds does is we have taking the behavioral activation framework, which is very common for depression. It is really about scheduling and reinforcing positive habits. And we have sort of digitalized the process. But there are ways, lots of other disorders and lots of other ways of working with this theoretical framework as well within CBT.

And I was reading on your LinkedIn channel or profile that you've got a Vinnova application. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Yeah. So that was the impact Startup Project where we got a grant of €30,000. We will now release to market in a couple of weeks and we will use that grant to verify the pricing model, the tracking of data in specific ways, and also have a small marketing budget for certain activities. So we're trying to validate the value proposition which we have provided.

So if someone is interested in CBT and adding a of gamification and some positive reinforcement, then they should come to Zeeds app and to you. Where can someone find you?

You can search for zeedsapp.com and find us on the web. We also are active on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. You can also search for me on LinkedIn and we would be happy to connect with anyone to show what we're doing and how we can help.