In Episode 2, Ty McKinney shares how he began 8 Bit Cortex as a research project for mental health assessments. He knew that he did not have the entrepreneurial skills needed to move it to an applied research stage and a minimally viable product (MVP) for pilot testing trials. It just happened that he was at the same neuroscience hackathons where he met Shannon Snaden and Valentyna Maslieieva who had entrepreneurial backgrounds and helped him to take the technology to the next stage.
They recognized early on that they needed several different skills and capabilities beyond technology and science in to create a gamified (a digital game)solution for mental health assessments – one that is easy and even entertaining to use – especially for use by the general public and by clinicians. So they grew their team to include website developers, game developers, graphic designers, and programmers to pull together the visual content and text forms for remote assessments. Eden Redman and Araz came on as a result of their collaboration with Neuro Nexus and helped them to transform the technology to a web App that was the prototype for their gamified psychological assessments.
Then there is also of course the clinical application, market research and business development components – they consulted with clinicians and as well with their networks to identify best practices as to how they can improve the engagement component to evolve their MVP to the next stage!
Stay tuned for Episode 3 in our Flash Session on how 8 Bit Cortex is differentiated from current mental health assessments!
About Shannon Snaden MBA, CRM
Co-founder
Shannon enjoys helping entrepreneurs to bring science out of the lab to build healthier communities. She brings her business development skills to 8 Bit Cortex as a co-founder and project manager. Her studies focused on entrepreneurship including exchanges to the oldest entrepreneurial hub in the world at Emlyon in Lyon, France and import/export studies at IPADE in Mexico City. She was also an ambassador for the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurship and a student consultant for a healthcare start-up at Creative Destruction Lab. She enjoys participating in healthcare-related hackathons including winning two COVID-19 MIT hackathons in 2020.
About Ty McKinney
Co-Founder
Ty is completing his PhD at the University of Utah on brainwave technology in mental health assessment. As the Research Director for Branch Out, and a consultant for ConsciousWorks, Ty is passionate about science outreach for health living. As a co-founder, Ty brings these skills to 8 Bit Cortex, a mental health, tech Startup Company. When not thinking about the brain, Ty can be found exploring nature, or planning a tiny home in the Canadian Rockies.
About Eden Redman BSc
CTO
Over the past several years, Eden has worked diligently to forge Edmonton and Alberta-wide communities around biotech & neurotech that span academia, medicine, and industry. From an expertise in neuroscience and programming to his penchant for software and product development he is poised to kickstart any great idea!
About 8 Bit Cortex
Now more than ever are we aware of the mental health challenges our society faces and the need for affordable and accessible tools to tackle it. Before we can fix mental health, we have to understand it, so 8 Bit Cortex is gamifying the psychological assessment process. While mental health assessments can be so tedious to fill out, our platform makes collecting mental health information more engaging and our analytics can help provide people with insight and personalized content on how to best approach their own struggles.
