shawn.me

Total Brain / SonderMind

Total Brain offered mental health self-assessments and self-care tools, plus interactive brain training games, mindfulness practices, and tools to improve sleep and reduce stress. SonderMind connects people with professional therapy and acquired Total Brain in November 2022.

Helping Veterans in Transition and Beyond

I owned the enterprise partnership with IBM and led a platform integration to power the mental health assessments and self-care tools inside GRIT (“Get Results in Transition”), a mobile app that delivers support resources to veterans in transition to civilian life.

I also led work to streamline and automate the process for handling therapy referrals, focusing in particular on referrals from VA facilities. The workflow was heavily manual, full of redundancies, and plagued with delays and errors that too often resulted in individuals abandoning the process and never receiving care. We reduced wait times for veterans to just hours and virtually eliminated drops and abandonments.

Self-Care + Therapy Synergy

After SonderMind acquired Total Brain, I led development of the first offering that combined the Total Brain self-assessment and self-care products with access to SonderMind professional therapy. We pushed a beta version out to thousands of employees of Total Brain’s large enterprise customers and saw immediate traction that validated the synergy between self-care and professional therapy.

Wearables for Stress Relief

I led work to add real-time stress monitoring and intervention to the Total Brain platform, utilizing wearables with built-in biometric sensors. I worked with our in-house neuroscience and health experts to develop algorithms and stress markers based on heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), breathing, sleep quality, and more. I established key partnerships for specialized software development and launched a successful pilot on Samsung and Garmin devices.