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Headspace Is Partnering With Oura, Furthering Its Mission To Revolutionize Mental Health Wellness

Over the years, Headspace has transformed from purely a meditation app to a platform that has become synonymous with empowering the value of mental health well-being.

Today at HLTH, the company announced that it will be partnering with Oura, the developer of the "smart ring" health and activity tracker, to further Headspace's mission to revolutionize mental health wellness.

Oura's smart ring provides a robust user experience— helping track sleep metrics, oxygen saturation, heart rate, and numerous other advanced functional metrics. Importantly, Oura announced today that it will be launching its "Daytime Stress" feature, which will help users identify specific stress triggers via constant monitoring of changes in heart rate and temperature by the ring. With more frequent capturing of this information, users can more closely find out what triggers their anxiety to help better manage and mitigate sources of stress.

This is where Headspace steps in. After being alerted to a high stress situation, Oura users will now be able to access stress-focused Headspace content such as guided meditations, breathing exercises, and muscle relaxation techniques. This will provide users with tactical measures to counteract stress and enable actual, tangible ways to overcome the specific trigger.

Russell Glass, CEO of Headspace, thoughtfully explains that Headspace's mission is to provide every single person with access to comprehensive mental health wellness services. He also explains that the company is incredibly mindful about how it creates content for users: "Headspace's approach to creating great content is to think really deeply about the user experience. We realize that great content leads to great engagement, and great engagement leads to great outcomes." This vision to ultimately drive better mental health outcomes is the company's primary goal, Glass says.

Regular and frequent meditation has shown to empirically decrease chronic stress and improve health ... [+] outcomes.

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This technology and growing emphasis on mental health wellness is timely. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that in 2021 alone, nearly 23% of adults in the U.S. Experienced a mental health illness; furthermore, only approximately 48% of adults with mental illnesses received treatment, and moreover, it was found that nearly 164 million people live in a designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Area—indicating significant barriers to accessing care.

Untreated mental health issues have numerous detrimental downstream impacts, often leading to worse overall healthcare outcomes (e.G., poorer sleep, higher risk for substance abuse, higher correlation with heart disease and diabetes, etc), lower productivity, and overall, generally lower quality of life measures.

This is the exact problem that Headspace is trying to solve—empowering users with real-time, actionable insights and methods by which they can better manage their mental health. The company announced last month that it would soon be partnering with Meta to launch its content on the Quest 3 virtual reality headset as yet another means by which patients can access the platform.

Overall, the world is slowly but surely shifting its focus to this important issue. Increasingly, especially amidst a burnout epidemic and higher rates of worker attrition, corporations are realizing that improving work culture and solving for employee well-being is a key factor in retaining top talent. Moreover, people are becoming increasingly cognizant of the value and importance of mental health—realizing that neglecting mental health needs often leads to significantly worse issues down the line.

As Glass thoughtfully explains, focusing on mental health wellness is one of the most important things that can be done to help improve the overall healthcare system and make an impact on healthcare outcomes. To do so, the healthcare industry will need to prioritize certain key levers: encourage people to seek care, make that care more accessible, and ultimately, raise awareness as to why this care is necessary. Fortunately, companies such as Headspace are already leading the charge on these efforts.

Health Highlights From Wellness Wednesday

Every Wednesday on MPR News with Angela Davis, you can listen to conversations about health and wellness.  

MPR News host Angela Davis revisits highlights from three recent conversations. An infectious disease doctor and pediatric nurse talk about vaccine fatigue as the new COVID-19 booster rolls out. Plus, the increasing number of children who are nearsighted and how to prevent and treat kidney disease.  

Guests:  

Dr. Greg Poland is an internal medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and an infectious disease expert. He's founder and director of the Mayo Vaccine Research Group and the Editor-in-Chief of the medical journal Vaccine.  

Sheyanga Beecher is a pediatric nurse practitioner with Hennepin HealthCare. She's also medical director of the mobile pediatric clinic, which has provided thousands of vaccines against COVID-19 and childhood diseases, along with basic health care. 

Dr. Mary Gregory is a board-certified optometrist based in Monticello, Minn., who specializes in children's vision and learning. 

Dr. Derek Horkey is an ophthalmologist with St. Paul Eye Clinic who does comprehensive eye care for adults. He has additional expertise in treating glaucoma. 

Dr. Naim Issa is a nephrologist treating people with kidney disease and kidney transplants at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Where he's also an associate professor at Mayo Clinic School of Medicine. 

Jennifer Cramer-Miller has lived with kidney disease since her early 20s. Her memoir "Incurable Optimist: Living with Illness and Chronic Hope" describes her four kidney transplants, including a kidney from her mother and from a 25-year-old anonymous donor. She serves as board chair of the National Kidney Foundation (serving Minnesota).  

 Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.  

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. 

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Pursue Wellness Rather Than Curing Illness – Dr. Tenkorang Annor

Nephrologist Dr Elliot Tenkorang Annor has urged Ghanaians to actively seek wellness rather than wait to be ill before visiting a health centre.

According to him, most Ghanaians revel in the fact that they are active and have never visited a hospital before rather than making regular visits to the hospital to check on their health.

This he says has led to people reporting to hospitals with advanced stages of illnesses which could have been easily prevented had they been there much earlier.

He stated that just as individuals take an interest in knowing their shoe size and waist size, they should equally be interested in knowing their weight, their sugar level and blood pressure level, at least.

"We should know our numbers as individuals. Now if we know our shoe size, if we know probably our bra size, our waist size, whatever it is like we should always know our numbers.

"Now indeed you cannot walk around not knowing what your weight is because you might not know that for the past week you have been gaining a lot of weight for which you need to do something about it.

"If you don't check your blood pressure, you would not know that that blood pressure is at 240 or whatever until sometimes you're lucky and it gives you a headache," he said.

Speaking on JoyFM's Super Morning Show, Dr Annor stressed that knowing these is very important to avoiding non-communicable diseases as they often occur with little to no symptoms.

"Most of these chronic non-communicable diseases unfortunately don't give symptoms. So if we are in a culture where somebody will tell you 'o doctor, I don't get sick so I have never been' in fact they get excited saying 'I have never visited a facility before';

"And then the first time you're seeing them they've gotten something chronic which they're going to need some medication or some intervention that is super expensive which I believe if we had seen them a year ago or two years ago probably we would have been able to change the dynamics.

"We need to be careful about our health, we need to know that without health as a country, we are nothing. We cannot do anything without our health," he said.

Corroborating Dr Annor's assertion, Kwame Asiedu Sarpong, a D&D Fellow on Public Health at CDD-Ghana, said Ghanaians are reluctant to go to hospitals.

Citing data from the Health Ministry, he said, "As of 2021, which is the latest data the Ministry of Health has, our out-patient per capita which is the number of times on average a Ghanaian will visit a health practitioner was 1.12.

"Which means the average Ghanaian seeks healthcare once a year. Ordinarily, it should be about four, which means you seek health care once every quarter."

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