Two Milwaukee entrepreneurs who met while working at Advocate Aurora Health are launching a new app designed to help users improve sleep, focus, stress levels and happiness through a meditation technique that involves repeating basic statements.
Their company, Joystik Life Inc., has yet to roll out its app but has already drawn $200,000 in seed funding from Inflect Health, the innovation and investment arm of the California-based health care provider Vituity.
Joystik intends to launch the app this spring and has a pilot partnership lined up to test it with high school students at Milwaukee's public Golda Meir School this summer through a partnership with the nonprofit organization Mental Health America of Wisconsin.
"Stress is, year-over-year, getting worse and worse ... all these solutions keep coming but it's still not getting better," Joystik co-founder and CEO Christian Stoll said. "We're really trying to make a dent, bring something really powerful but easier to integrate into people's lives."
Joystik's relaxation exercises combine classical conditioning with autogenics, a training technique it describes as an evidence-based blend of self-hypnosis, meditation, mindfulness, relaxation therapy and biofeedback training that has been used by NASA and Olympic athletes.
Joystik co-founder chief clinical officer Dr. Sarah Pierce is a physician at Advocate Aurora who currently practices in an urgent care setting and is board certified in family and integrative medicine.
Stoll previously worked at Advocate Aurora for 13 years, where he led innovation efforts for the hospital system's behavioral health services department. He's originally from Virginia, near Washington, D.C.
The Joystik app has a gamified approach designed to cater to Gen Z and Millennials, Stoll said. The training is safe for children ages five and older and the company is targeting high school students to start. Its video game controller-inspired logo and branding are meant to appeal to that audience, Stoll said.
"We want to really help people realize the control they don't think they have over stress, over sleep, over all these things," Stoll said.
