ARKEO New mental health app to track mental fitness

It’s not rocket science, it’s just simple common sense – track your mental wellbeing just as you would your physical fitness.

That’s the message from entrepreneur Jana Dowling, creator and CEO of ARKEO, a new app to monitor mental fitness, and a woman who has talked the talk and walked the walk.

Her own personal descent into a severe depressive period was the genesis of ARKEO when she created an offline tracking system to help her recover.

Today it is an empowering app – a fitness bit for your brain – allowing users to keep tabs on their mental fitness by tracking everyday behaviours, lifestyle choices and challenges, highlighting when they are connected and enabling people to better manage the demands and dilemmas we all face from time to time. The data driven insights the app provides are just like those we use everyday to track and manage physical health.

“It’s not about abstaining completely from things we know aren’t good for us or changing how we live or who we are – it’s just about having a clear and simple understanding of our behaviours and putting us in the driving seat when it comes to making informed decisions about our mental health,” says Jana.

“We don’t think twice about reaching for Instagram or checking our fitness tracker, they’re an integral part of many people’s lives, and we’re aiming to make ARKEO just as indispensable for anyone who cares about managing their mental fitness .”

The simple, easy-to-use MyArkeo app tracks personal behaviour and life’s emotions, providing:

a daily mental fitness score, plus an average score over time
weekly tracking of data to ensure it is adequate for accurate analysis
a Lightbulb moment, calculated from mathematical analysis of the data and highlighting coefficient correlations, which lets the user know when there is a significant link between behaviours and challenges.
share data – a 30-day report to share with friends, doctors or support workers
signposting – ARKEO can’t solve or diagnose mental health issues but can signpost users to NHS support sites

Jana says: “I built ARKEO originally to help myself but I discovered that a lot more people needed a tool like this too.

“Mental ill health is the single largest cause of disability in the UK, contributing up to 22.8% of the total burden, compared to 15.9% for cancer and 16.2% for cardiovascular disease1. The wider economic costs of mental illness in England have been estimated at £105.2 billion each year. “And now, after almost two really tough years with Covid-19, the need for mental health vigilance has become even more evident.

“We’ve had to come up with new ways of communicating, working, exercising and living. But with physical strength comes mental strength, and with mental strength you become more resilient. Today, more than ever, we need to be both mentally and physically fit. And with additional knowledge of ourselves comes the power to achieve that.”