“We believe we can change the lives of athletes” | Moodbeam 

Mental health is a prominent societal issue that is gaining more and more attention after years of stigma and neglect.  

You often hear people advising sufferers from mental health conditions to ‘talk about it’ or find someone in which to confide in.  

This is not as easy as it may seem, and those first conversations do not come easy to someone suffering from an issue that, for years, has had a stigma attached to it.  

Moodbeam is a wearable band, with two buttons: ‘one for ok, one for not ok.’ These buttons can represent whatever you want; happy and sad, anxious or not, depressed or not, productive or not. It is completely up to the user.  

As the user presses each button, to reflect their mood, their response is logged in the Moodbeam app and the user can see how their mood has changed over the course of the day.  

We spoke to co-founders Christina Colmer McHugh and Jonathan Elvidge on the formation, purpose, impact and future of Moodbeam.  

Athlete Media Group (AMG): Firstly, can you explain what Moodbeam does?

Jonathan: Moodbeam allows you to log how you’re feeling, store that information within the wearable, whether it is your phone or tablet, and then automatically transfer it to the paired app. 

You literally get to see how you feel and it does that with the use of two buttons on the wearable. You can call it happy and not, you could equally call it ok not ok or stress and relaxed, energised and not, productive or unproductive. It’s trying to understand and log how you are feeling in a way that would help provide context in what it is you’re trying to understand and correlate it to how you feel.  

AMG: What was the initial motivation to start Moodbeam?  

Christina Colmer-McHugh: Moodbeam was born out of a personal need. My daughter, who was 7 at the time, came to me and was having a tough time at school. I just didn’t see that coming at all, I thought we were a family that really talked about everything, so it was a real shock to the system that my 7 year old had been trying to cope.  

It left me really wondering how she was when she wasn’t with me, and I felt that I needed to see what that looked like so that I could have a conversation with her and see if she was coping. That was really the idea behind Moodbeam.  

AMG: What was your initial reaction when asked to get involved Jonathan?  

Jonathan: We talked it over and I said; ‘Well you need to do it.’ I’ve got a young daughter as well, so I had empathy with the situation. Christina asked if I wanted to help make it happen, so that was it, we really started moving with a view to create a wearable device to allow a parent to see how their son or daughter was feeling.  

“I really liked the idea of this form of connection using technology”

I really liked the idea of this form of connection using technology. I’d just spent 20 years looking at gadgets and I’ve never come across anything quite like this. The thought that you could create a device that a child could wear that would allow them to express how they’re feeling, with that then reported back at the end of the day leading to a conversation, I could see a real benefit of having that information.  

AMG: Your branding and the device itself is really nice to look at, how important was design in the process?  

Jonathan: We knew we needed something that someone would want to wear. A lot of emphasis was put into designing not only the wearable but  the visualisations for the app, the branding and the whole imagery behind everything we do. We have a designer on the team who has worked very hard to make sure that we have a product that people would want to own and use.  

“We’ve tried to make it unisex and something
that a 7-year-old girl or a 15-year-old boy
or a 45- year old man or a 76-year-old
woman would want to wear”

Christina: We’ve worked so hard to keep it simple and looking clean and enjoyable. We’ve tried to make it unisex and something that a 7-year-old girl or a 15-year-old boy or a 45- year old man or a 76-year-old woman would want to wear and that’s taken an awful lot.  

AMG: It is also quite unobtrusive and subtle.  

Jonathan: We knew we needed something that was very lightweight and easy to wear. If you are sensitive about wearing it – we found that most people are the opposite – but if you are you can just bring it to the inside of your wrist it just looks like a charity band. There’s a module that (sticks) pops out of the silicone band that plugs into any USB port, some wearables require a specific dock, and then if you take it somewhere and forget that it becomes unusable, so that was important.  

AMG: When did you realise you had a product to take to market?  

Christina: We were basically pacing up and down 5000 stands at an electronics wearables fair in Hong Kong, it was like the Goldilocks story, coming against all these big stands and some are too big, some are too small, but we came across the one that was just right.  

I thought; ‘Oh my god this is it!’ It was intelligent, beautiful and soft. I thought it’s got to be close to your skin and you have got to fall in love with it and want to wear it. That was my moment.  

 “It is quite a bold statement, but we do
actually believe we can change lives
with the use of Moodbeam because
it is that conversation starter”

Jonathan: When we started, we very quickly began to realise we had to simplify the original. It had 5 buttons and five different moods on it and we realised when we spoke to people, mums particularly, what they were really interested in was whether the user was happy or not happy. So when it became a two-button device, all of a sudden we were talking to people around mental health, particularly anxiety, depression, stress as well, as specifics such as PTSD, bipolar and all these different areas started to come up.  

We started to get some really interesting insights and feedback. The fact that it’s non-verbal is really powerful. We found that there was a therapist who managed to use it to communicate with somebody she was working with who wouldn’t normally communicate and it led to an understanding of what was going on.  

AMG: So Moodbeam helps to start the initial conversation around whatever the user is going through?  

Jonathan: That’s exactly it. Instead of getting a general response you get a conversation based on a specific moment in time. It’s that conversation that comes from that very specific question and that is where the power is  

“I do think that we do have a tool that
can latch on to all the existing expertise
in society and add a metric that didn’t exist until now”  

AMG: Do you think Moodbeam can be something that helps with mental health as a whole in the UK?  

Christina: It is quite a bold statement, but we do actually believe we can change lives with the use of Moodbeam because it is that conversation starter, but it is all on that person’s terms. I wanted my young daughter to feel like she was in control of it, because I won’t be doing her any favours to have her thoughts for her. I wanted her to feel quite empowered by the fact that she could look at how she felt and then explain what that meant to her.  

I do think that we do have a tool that can latch on to all the existing expertise in society and add a metric that didn’t exist until now.  

Jonathan: What we do now is just tell people what it does and the simplicity of how it works and very quickly people join the dots in the context of their own lives. It can be used to evidence behaviour or mood. A very simple case would be somebody running a yoga course and knows that those people that had taken it come out feeling much better, it’s very hard to evidence that at the moment, whereas Moodbeam is a tool that allows you to evidence existing interventions or practices.  

“What we do now is just tell people
what it does and the simplicity of how it works
and very quickly people join the dots
in the context of their own lives”

AMG: How do you work within sport?  

Christina: We were introduced to a man who used to run the British Athletics commission for many years. He was very open about the fact that, through years of trying to help other people, it had taken its toll on his own mental health.  

He said it just helped him feel so much better and from that then we were introduced to a whole raft of people that he had worked with throughout his sporting life; elite Olympic athletes, academies, Paralympians. Now, we are working with Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club taking them for their academy. We also work with Everton Football Club, who support Tackling the Blues by going into schools and talking about resilience and Danielle Brown MBE and what she’s doing now in her transitional phase out of professional sport.  

AMG: What are your goals for the future?  

Jonathan: We’re at a really exciting phase now, so products have landed and we have pre sold 20% of the first batch into different areas, notably into sport, the NHS, universities, some councils and some private medical insurers and to a lot of individuals who are buying it for their personal needs.  

We’re in the final stages of completing the app and then, when the product gets into the hands of users, that’s when we really get to see where the impact might be. We’ve given ourselves 6 months to understand it better and then our aim is to scale up the business to maximise the impact of Moodbeam being in other parts of the world.