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@viraj yes totally agreed. I'd like Neuralink to have decidedly conservative engineering practices before considering getting one. I was going to say Boeing-level practices, but... maybe SpaceX level? I guess Musk has proven he can make safe, well-engineered systems, so it's primarily a question of incentives. Also, not sure if you saw but I cover data privacy in this post!

@Gabe Thanks, a friend actually was working on "Strava for meditation", here's the website for it: https://www.mindstreaks.com. I definitely love the idea of using a social aspect to encourage posting more. Social feeds + likes of some sort does seem to be one of the most reliable sources of variable rewards/dopamine hits for better or worse, so might as well put the strong habit loop mechanism to good use. I'll check out intellect!

I dig the watch app for easy capture, and the idea of rolling up point in time feelings for frequency/severity. PHQ-9 can be sufficient for screening but unfortunately is too subjective/variable to be an accurate measure of ongoing severity. And in a consumer context, I expect it's not very sensitive and you get dulled to taking it repeatedly, although the prompt for self reflection and seeing any metric trend over time is powerful.

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Data privacy and confidentiality also factor into this, people will want assurance that their private mental health related thoughts aren’t leaking out to randoms on the web. This is something which scares me about Neuralink — Musk is certainly my favorite billionaire but I still don’t want some random Megacorp’s hardware in my head. Also, can you imagine the effects of software glitches!?

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Great writeup! I couldn't help myself from thinking of a "Strava" for personal health (beyond exercise) while reading the Compliance section. You're right that there are a ton of different sources of data to measure but I wonder if an app that pulls in screen time, physical activity and asks the users a few questions would be enough to initially make a difference.

Have you ever come across https://www.intellect.co/? Not sure if it's available on iOS but it is in the play store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.intellect.app) They have a module on "Overcoming anxiety & worry" that came to mind while reading this.

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