Canadians can measure stress with ease via new app

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It’s World Brain Day on Wednesday, so it appears there’s no time like the present to introduce a new app — called Dawn DTx — that purports to measure your stress levels with a 30-second photo scan of your facial features on a smartphone.

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From Wednesday until Sunday, Canadians will be able to gauge where they’re at stress-wise for free on the app — later to be available by subscription — with a personalized report at the end of the so-called TruSelf five-day brain health challenge.

The app is a partnership between the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) and Mobio Interactive.

“This is a way of having some reflection of your own internal dialogue,” said Toronto-based Dr. Tom Mikkelsen, a clinical neurologist and CEO and scientific director of OBI. “And potentially, put some metrics on it for better, for worse. There’s nothing magical about the (stress-level) score per se. It’s really more about the trends, and some insight as far as what is your level of stress. Do you recognize it in the background? Is it a positive, good stress that’s motivating? Or is it stressful and burdensome?”

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Take the five-day challenge for free with your smartphone

From Wednesday until Sunday, participants can complete brief check-ins several times a day with a 30-second smartphone facial scan.

“You’re getting a notification to check in at a moment through your day,” Mikkelsen said. “You take a moment of self-reflection. You score on the app and then proceed with your day. And periodically you’ll get these engagements that allows you to measure at that moment when you’re planning to do it, not when you’re sort of distracted with other things. And you can look at the trends over time, either through the day or through the week, that type of thing, to find out what is your overall level of stress and how does it coincide with your quality of life, your quality of productivity, and things like that.

“People will find either you’re motivated and stressed in a good way for productive period, like our ‘on’ times with focused learning and things like that, but there are other times where it’s acting like background stress in moments where you should be in rest-and-digest mode.”

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Individuals can register for the free brain health challenge at braininstitute.ca.

Mikkelsen said that after about four to five years of research and testing on thousands of people, the app is supposed to deliver “a simple, science-informed way” to recognize how stress can affect concentration, sleep, mood, productivity, and overall well-being.

The campaign is built around the message: “Stress isn’t the problem. Misunderstanding it is.”

“The more you can get some internal assessment of how stress is in your life that’s presumably informative to how you can actually begin to have a plan to tackle it,” Mikkelsen said. “I think the idea is really to bring some science to the management of complicated life and to recognize that the stress, again can be positive, it can be productive, it can also be dysfunctional and to get a handle on the metrics around that is perhaps one step learning the burden of it.”

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