At the AFA Warfare Symposium in Colorado, Lumena, a startup based in Denver, showcased its MindGym. The MindGym is a sensory experience designed to enhance mental health, offering a unique environment for users to explore their thoughts and emotions.
“It allows you a breath into yourself, and the ability to think way deeper than all this stuff in our standard reality consciousness, and start to very quickly interact with our subconscious, the things that come to a person’s mind, visually, because the brain when not stimulated, is trying to stimulate, trying to make up things, trying to fill in the blanks,” said Stetson Jenkins, Lumena’s director of product.
Lumena’s partnership with the Air Force was facilitated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The program provided funding for Lumena to develop its product into something with tangible benefits for service members.
“We started working on how to create a user interface that was intuitive, a self-serve kiosk system,” Jenkins said. “And ultimately, could collect, analyze, and give results on at that first the bio data. So heart rate, heart rate variability and respiration rate, with a target of how do we take these really stressed out folks, and just reduce their heart rate. And so that was the initial what we launched into.”
Pam Glick, the CEO of Lumena, emphasized initiatives the team took to scale its product.
“We didn’t really have a product that could be mass distributed yet, we really needed to scale it to be able to deliver it with a quality that we wanted to have,” Glick said. “So when I first came in, I kind of pivoted the company to let’s raise money, invest in the tech both the physical composition of the box as well as the software used to support it.”
The initial results of the MindGym were promising, leading to its deployment at nearly a dozen Air Force installations worldwide. According to Glick, MindGym has made its way into nine major Air Force combatant commands.
“And now that we’ve got it scaled, we’re looking to expand it within each of those bases,” Glick said.
Overall, the success of the MindGym reflects a growing recognition of the importance of mental health and well-being in various fields, including the military.
The collaboration between Lumena and the Air Force demonstrates a commitment to enhancing mental fitness alongside physical fitness, paving the way for new approaches to mental health care.
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