Since our public launch this June we’ve received a tremendous amount of amazing feedback and a lot of questions of why we decided to follow this certain path and what’s coming next.
And here’s a long answer!
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… or, in reality, 2023, Bear Room was born as one of the final 14 concepts that made it through the DŌBRA Grand Prix, a series of events aimed at finding solutions for mental health and well-being, one of the toughest problems humanity is facing right now. Powered by the one and only DŌBRA Venture Studio, over 1,000 raw ideas were filtered and developed by industry professionals, fine-tuning, among others, the one that forms the foundation of Bear Room – an AI-powered assistant for mental health first aid.
Right from the start we were looking to provide reassurance, support and a safety net for those in need, which later formulated the concept of a room – your safe place for unbearable times. It all fit really well with the second aspect we were researching – proactive prevention, giving our users the ability not only to mitigate the crisis, but to learn to prevent it from happening in the first place.
To make prevention proactive, the very first thing to do is to make the mitigation easy. How easy, you might ask? We’re aiming at “as easy as possible”, with the most limited learning curve, to make sure that the user won’t be scared away from the overloaded interface or scientific terms that are hard to understand.
A safety net, providing reassurance and support during mental crises with a proactive prevention component to it – this is how we’ve started Bear Room.
At Bear Room we focus on the instant aspect of stress relief, basing the idea on the positive distraction concept, where even a couple minutes away from stress delivers substantial benefits to both coping and further prevention. The app offers a variety of scientifically-backed exercises, including breathwork, EMDR, vocal practices, and tapping, lasting 3-5 minutes on average, allowing users to press pause during stressful moments. Even a short distraction is proven to effectively interrupt the body’s stress response (PubMed), and in Bear Room we increase the power of the distraction by filling the time with evidence-based techniques that help to further reduce stress.
And what’s next?
Next steps are serving two main purposes:
- Introduce gamification to help our users find additional motivation to explore the room deeper and dive into the world of different techniques
- Prediction mode to catch the moment of stress before it happens and help to build the habit of checking on yourself into daily routine
At our current stage, we focus on coping, to help those with daily/chronic stress avoid further damage. Our next step is full-scale prevention, to help avoid the damage in the first place. However, it is definitely not a final destination. Stay tuned to learn more!