Juli, an artificial-intelligence-powered chronic condition platform, leverages technology to give patients insight to better manage their chronic mental health disorders. New research suggests that the combination of digital self-monitoring, AI and personalized behavioral changes can relieve troubling psychological symptoms.
Juli was founded by tech veteran Bettina Hein with the desire to support conditions like bipolar disorder that require specialized mental health care. The app tracks behavioral patterns to pinpoint triggers and help patients avoid eliciting a manic-depressive cycle. This week, the app revealed research that showed 55.5% of users of its app reported a reduction in mania or hypomania after using the app for eight weeks. The app also has interfaces to help people manage conditions like depression, migraines, asthma, hypertension and chronic pain.
The study covered a six-month period of 208 Juli users diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“We believe Juli works because it does more than help people track their mood—it identifies and helps them understand unseen correlations between their symptoms and their behavior based on the information they share, and it alerts their care teams if their health state is deteriorating,” said Hein, Juli’s CEO and co-founder. “This analysis of bipolar users is just one of many examples of how Juli is helping our users to understand the triggers and levers that help them keep their conditions stable.”
The platform has partnered with University College London to conduct a randomized control trial to validate its findings.
Before Juli was launched, a 2020 review of applications in the space published in the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders found that no evidence-based apps tailored to the disorder were readily available. A study from the same journal in April of this year concluded that platforms designed with specific conditions in mind were more supportive of positive mental health than broad spectrum mental health applications for those diagnosed with behavioral health disorders, such as the 2.8% of Americans who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Juli’s growth comes at a time when the digital behavioral health market continues to boom and regulatory bodies are taking notice. This summer, the Department of Justice launched an investigation of mental health startup Cerebral for its prescriptive practices of controlled substances.
While Juli does not prescribe medications, healthcare providers can access their patients' app information for insight into their care and be notified when a patient’s mental health is deteriorating.
"People with chronic conditions are desperate for a solution that will help them take control of their health and generate new insights for healing,” Kristen Valdes, Juli advisory board member and CEO of b.well Connected Health, said in a press release. “Juli is uniquely built to accomplish that goal by enabling consumers to integrate the health data we all produce every day while avoiding the limitations of point solutions that tackle each disease separately without looking at the whole patient.”
Juli aggregates data from electronic medical records, smartphones, wearable devices and the environment with the idea of giving users a global idea of their health. Users also respond to three to five daily questions and biweekly clinically validated, condition-specific questionnaires. Users may then accept personalized suggestions on micro-behavioral changes.
The platform analyzes things like local air quality measures and may suggest users go to the gym rather than exercise outdoors if air pollution tends to trigger depressive episodes. Suggestions like these help users improve overall health, according to Juli’s eight-week study.
“This is a very positive result for a population that has generally been underserved by digital health to date,” said Joseph Hayes, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry at University College London and co-founder of Juli. “In my clinical work with people with bipolar disorder I’ve met many who have kept a record of their behavior and its impact on their condition for years, and it seemed to help them to prevent relapse. Juli automates that process in a more clinically validated fashion as well as revealing patterns related to such things as weather and pollution that may be non-intuitive to our users.”
The startup received $3.8 million in seed funding earlier this summer from Speedinvest, Norrsken VC, SoftBank's Vision Fund Emerge Program and Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures. Juli followed the round with the development of its advisory board including Valdes and Joe Kvedar, M.D., professor at Harvard Medical School.