How to Make Your Phone Into an Ally, Not an Enemy
Technology doesn’t have to be an isolating force
“How could a phone be a shrink?” This question drove my research at Intel in 2006 and led to a prototype we called the Mood Phone. I knew the idea flew in the face of an implicit tenet of therapy: that unmediated interpersonal dialogue was essential for it to be effective. But I also knew that the traditional model of therapy was constrained by the technological limitations of the age in which it first developed.
I spent the better part of a decade training to become a clinical psychologist. I saw how powerful individual therapy can be, but I also knew that the “talking cure” — the late-19th-century paradigm of an extended dialogue between a therapist and client held in a setting removed from the client’s everyday life — didn’t scale. A good therapist is expensive, physically distant, and available by appointment only. Our problems occur in the mix of our lives, unscheduled.
So I began the Mood Phone effort as an experiment with colleagues at Intel and Columbia University. The Mood Phone was an app designed to serve as a personal therapeutic agent, with interactive prompts rooted in the psychological principles used by therapists, specifically cognitive behavioral therapy. We wanted to offer individuals a digital therapist at…
