Public Funding for Tech Balance Ltd

Students spend more time online than anything else. Yet, 1 in 4 students finds that their screen-time has become a problem, and 70% say that the overall impact of their screen-time on their mental health is negative. At Tech Balance, we help prevent mental health issues by proactively supporting digital wellbeing and productivity. We deliver digital wellbeing services at colleges and universities through our diagnostic survey, coaching sessions, and workshops - which have impacted the lives of over 1000 students to date. We are now integrating our innovations to create a mobile app to scale our solutions for even greater impact. With funding from Innovate UK, we have worked closely with students and University College London to design a functional prototype that empowers students to find and maintain a healthy and productive digital lifestyle. In this project, we aim to build on our success by developing and launching our app, working alongside colleges and universities as we commercialise our offerings and scale Tech Balance in the UK and internationally.

Mindful & Intentional Screen-time for Students (MISS) aims to cut the staggering £117.9 billion yearly cost of our mental health problems in the UK. We will support the one-third of students whose mental health needs currently go unmet by investigating a breakthrough solution that empowers students to improve their tech habits, given that: * three quarters of students spend more time online than they'd like on a daily basis * one in three find that their screen-time has become a problem in their personal lives, and * nearly 70% find that the overall impact of their screen-time on their mental health is negative Current screen-time apps focus on the symptom of the problem (screen-time) but do little to cater to the underlying cause of problematic screen-time for students: poor mental and physical health, and regret from time poorly spent. We present a step-change in tackling our mental health crisis that circumvents the mental health stigma by supporting student mental health under the guise of digital lifestyle improvements. We will explore the feasibility and design of a tech-based solution for boosting digital wellbeing using the Tech Balance MILE framework: 1\.**Mindfulness** - understanding what your current relationship with technology looks like → by embedding a self-driven and first-of-a-kind tech-neutral visualisation of digital wellbeing across life domains 2\.**Intentionality** - gaining clarity on what you want to achieve by establishing goals to work towards in life domains (e.g., reduced late-night device use) → a feature unprecedented in current screen-time tools 3\.**Lifestyle change** - building better habits using proven systems from behavioural science → by going beyond the current habit app provisions and catering to the nuances of digital wellbeing 4\.**Efficacy** - using tools to install effective and long-lasting lifestyle improvements → by designing bespoke features and content using cutting edge behaviour change and digital wellbeing science, including a new self-learning AI system that, over time, learns and adapts the most effective behaviour change and content prompts. Working directly with key stakeholders and industry leading experts, this project will evidence how screen-time impacts student livelihoods, validate gaps in existing solutions, design a prototype to enable self-driven improvements in technology habits with an AI decision-making system, and create a go-to-market strategy for the development phase and commercialisation.

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