Kai Koerber was a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman murdered 14 students and three staff members on Valentine’s Day in 2018.
Kai Koerber showcases his app, Joy, on Thursday, July 27, 2023, in Berkeley, Calif. Koerber was a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman murdered 14 students and three staff members on Valentine's Day in 2018. Seeing his peers and himself struggle with returning to normal, he says he wanted to do something to help people manage their emotions on their own terms.
“In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the first thing that came to mind after we’ve experienced this horrible, traumatic event — how are we going to personally recover?” he said. “It’s great to say OK, we’re going to build a better legal infrastructure to prevent gun sales, increased background checks, all the legislative things. But people really weren’t thinking about ... the mental health side of things.
“The notion of mindfulness being a solo activity or something that’s confined to sitting in your room breathing is something that we’re very much trying to dispel,” Koerber said. It doesn’t always get your mood right, so it's possible to manually pick your disposition. Let’s say you are feeling “neutral” at the moment. The app suggests several activities, such as 15-second exercise called “mindful consumption” that encourages you to “think about all the lives and beings involved in producing what you eat or use that day.”
A plethora of wellness apps on the market claim to help people with mental health issues, but it’s not always clear whether they work, said Colin Walsh, a professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University who has studied the use of AI in suicide prevention. According to Walsh, it is feasible to take someone’s voice and glean some aspects of their emotional state.
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