Why do you record my sessions?

There are a number of important reasons we record your sessions:

• Record keeping – you’ll have access to all your transcripts in the future so you can remember what you talked about.

• Tracking – our system will pull out key themes and trends in your transcripts so you can see how your conversations change over time, and how that correlates with other experiences.

• Quality control – we’ll regularly review calls to make sure that our team is doing the best work for you; and leverage the recordings at times for supervision – to help us learn how to do our work better.

• Learning – we’ll anonymize your recordings and include them in our machine learning model so we can learn how to best help people experiencing similar challenges to yours. We’ll share what we learn with you through our platform so you can understand yourself and others better too!

Why do you track my cell phone data?

From your cell phone, we’re collecting data on your biometrics (heart rate, sleep, etc.), movement data, accelerometer data, and usage data.

We use this data in multiple ways:

• Important outcomes – First it is important objective data to discuss with your team as it gives us a window into some of the foundational elements of your health and wellbeing we don’t otherwise have access to. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not leaving your room, and your heart rate is through the roof – it’s very hard to imagine you’re doing well.

• Personalized insights – Our system can start to correlate these objective measures with the symptoms you experience, to help you figure out what you need to focus on to feel better – some people are more sensitive to sleep than others, for instance. Or it may be that when you spend time at your mom’s place you get more stressed out. These are important personal insights we need to help you, and we can’t get them any other way.  

• Learning – we’ll anonymize your data and include it in our machine learning model so we can learn how to best help people experiencing similar challenges to yours in the future. We’ll share what we learn with you through our platform so you can understand yourself and others better too!

Why do you ask regular questions?

• Important outcomes – how you talk about yourself and how you describe your symptoms will change (hopefully!) as you go through coaching or treatment. We ask a lot of questions up front so we can get a baseline, and follow up with you so that we can understand if what we’re doing with you is actually working. During your regular reviews, we’ll discuss this data to make sure we’re working as efficiently as possible towards your goals.

• Self reflection – just the process of answering these questions can give you more nuanced insight into who you are and what you’re struggling with, and seeing your trends in experience over time can help inform and motivate the work you’re doing with us.

• Learning – we’ll anonymize your data and include it in our machine learning model so we can learn how to best help people experiencing similar challenges to yours better in the future. We’ll share what we learn with you through our platform so you can understand yourself and others better too!

Where does my data go?

There are 4 places your data can go through our platform:

• To your own dashboard: you’ll have access to all your data as well as some cool analytics to be able to understand yourself better and track your patterns over time

• To your team: the team that’s assigned to you (both Personily and clinical) will have access to your data, as well as any data that others provide about you. This will help them build and maintain the most comprehensive understanding of where you are today, what you need, and where you’re going

• To your significant other: if you want family and friends to follow your journey, you can give them access to some of your data. This is limited and totally within your control.

• Our data science and machine learning team: we encrypt and anonymize your data, and use it in our machine learning models to better understand the human brain, how it works, and how to make people better. You’ll see insights from this research periodically on the platform. By using our platform you’re helping us build better, more precise treatments for all.

What is the role of the Significant Other? What happens when I add someone?

Psychiatry as it’s practiced today has a problem – clinicians only see what clients show them. But no person – regardless of how healthy they are – is fully aware of their behaviors and how they affect other people. Interpersonal relationships are one of the core pillars of a healthy life, and so if we’re going to help you build a healthy life, we can’t just monitor how you feel, but also need to know how others feel around you.

We strongly encourage that you join our platform with someone else. That person should be someone who knows you well, sees you often, and who you trust to directly and honestly provide feedback on how you’re doing – not just in the context of a therapy session or meeting – but in the much more messy space of real life.

When you add them, that person will receive an email to create an account and be asked to fill out a profile, just like the one you filled out.

They will then be asked to fill out a short survey about you – and we’ll check in with them quarterly to see how things have changed.

To make sure your significant others feel comfortable being completely honest, we won’t share their reports directly with you, but your clinicians or Personily team can share information with you they think is relevant to your work together.