Israelis and Palestinian Entrepreneurs Collaborate to Ease Covid-19 Mental Health Worries

    TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, April 20, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Led by Dr. Guy Doron, clinical psychologist and researcher at IDC, the team was on track to develop a personalised mobile app for dealing with various mental difficulties by improving people's inner dialogue. "Then the pandemic started," says Dr. Doron, a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy expert and specialist in Obsessive Compulsive Disorders and Digital Health. "Behaviors that were considered clinical such as washing hands many times a day are now the new normal. Moreover, activities that were considered healthy such as going to the beach for a jog are disallowed."

"We realised we were facing something completely new. While technically, many people have more spare time, a lot of it is spent on news consumption, chores and pure survival, so it is hard to find quality time to look after ourselves. We knew we had to build something that improves resilience and coping even if done in very quick exercises of 3-4 minutes at a time."

"We wanted to respond as quickly as we could, Guy started working on the content, but we had many technical challenges we had to take care of in order to succeed. Most of the capable people we talked to were busy balancing their own boats or in some state of shock," recalls Gur Ilany, CEO of GGtude, the digital health startup that provides the platform for the project. "Then we met Mohammed Faour, a young and brilliant engineer and entrepreneur from Nablus in the West Bank. He looked at our project, saw the importance and potential, and didn't waste any time before joining the collaborative effort."

"We really wanted to work together from our office space at WeWork Labs in Tel Aviv, but in the current situation we have to bridge the gap by attending remote meetings," says Gali Bloch Liran, a mental resilience mentor who joined the project this month to assist with her expertise in entrepreneurship strategic thinking. "The team spirit is still high and we are aiming to help millions of people worldwide, so this feeling in itself gives us lots of motivation in these otherwise difficult times."

In two weeks, the team managed to build one of the world's first reliable, research backed personal tools for building mental resilience. "We are using a new framework that allows us to code very quickly and publish it for both Apple and Android phones. We also migrated our servers to cloud infrastructure," explains Mohammed Faour. "so now we can handle the growing demand without trouble."

"After a successful launch, we now want to update our app with more topics relevant to the ever changing challenges. While we already have more than 10 academic studies showing the effectiveness of the platform, we want to keep researching it to better understand how to help people deal with psychological difficulties," says Dr. Doron. "And after this is over, we all plan to meet together, in Tel Aviv or in Nablus, and celebrate the awesomeness of the human spirit."

GG Life is now available for a free download on the Apple App store and on Google Play.

Apple iOS:
iPhone download link

Google Play:
Google Play download link

Enquiries:
[email protected]

About GGtude
GGtude is one of the world's most researched digital mental health platforms with award winning apps offering personalized excercises to people dealing with mental challenges.

Learn more at https://ggtude.com

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