MENTAL HEALTH DEVICES: SCIENCE OR SNAKE OIL?

Startups are taking mental health care beyond pills and therapy, through wearable devices

- Samiksha Goel [e-mail]

It's a quiet Tuesday evening inside the Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters cafe in Koramangala, Bengaluru. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee hangs in the air as I'm handed a device that looks fairly simple, black in colour and something between a headband and a headset, except it doesn’t cover the ears. There are no flashy screens, no blinking lights, no music to play. It isn’t built to count your steps or track your sleep. Instead, it goes a step ahead and is aimed at speaking to your brain.

“This might feel like a slight tingling,” says Jai Sharma, co-founder of Mave Health, a Bengaluru-based mental wellness startup, as he connects the headset to an app on his phone. He taps a button on his phone. A few seconds later, I feel it, a faint, rhythmic pulse against my forehead, subtle enough to ignore but impossible not to notice. It’s called neurostimulation, and it promises to do what few wearables have dared to attempt: calm the mind, ease stress, sharpen focus and, in some cases, assist in treating conditions such as depression, anxiety, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or addiction.

For years, India’s wellness tech has revolved around metrics and tracking: how fast you ran, how well you slept, how many calories you burned. But startups such as Mave Health, Marbles Health, InnerGize, UK-based Mindspire and Israel-based BrainQ are rewriting that script. They are building devices that don’t just measure mental wellbeing, but aim to improve it.

Their approach combines neuroscience, design and accessibility with the ambition to bring brain-tech out of laboratories and into everyday life. These startups are running pilots, seeking regulatory clearances and raising early rounds of capital to make neurostimulation both affordable and mainstream.