How should we address mental health in the workplace? This is an age-old question that doesn’t have a clear-cut answer. NuRelm is one of several Pittsburgh-based tech companies currently working on products to address mental health. Here's a look at the technology the company is developing.
Mainly working with university and commercial investors with projects in the biomedical sector, NuRelm Inc. is a company designed to solve mobile and web application challenges.
The company’s two mental well-being apps -— the BRITEPath app and the MoodRing app — are geared toward mental health in youth and adolescents.
“About 95% of adolescents across socioeconomic status and racial backgrounds carry their cell phones with them all the time. If you’re trying to intervene with them, the best practice is to have that intervention at hand,” Jeff Stuncard, operations liaison at NuRelm, said.
Stuncard said the company worked with the ETUDES Center at the University of Pittsburgh to develop the BRITEPath app.
The ETUDES center focuses on depression and suicidality, so the BRITEPath app is helpful in assisting providers to have a safety plan set up for youth and adolescents. Patients can track their mood and participate in different activities to help them mitigate symptoms.
The MoodRing app also assists young people with depression by helping them to track trends in their mood. The goal of doing this is to be able to track trends, alert clinicians about worsening mood symptoms and have a bit of self management in patients’ mood symptoms between sessions.
NuRelm and its partners including Pitt, the University of Virginia and design consultancy Fine Humans received about $1.6 million in National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants to design and develop this app.
Sam Shaaban, CEO of NuRelm, founded the company in Austin, Texas, in 1999 and has since moved it to Pittsburgh. The North Side-based company now employs 17.
Currently neither of the apps are commercialized. The BRITEPath app is being used in a clinical setting for UPMC and through clinical settings within the University of Pittsburgh.
An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the BRITEPath app.
