The bold Aussie start-up using AI to track your emotions

Nicole Gibson was Australia’s youngest-ever Commonwealth mental health commissioner, managing a $27 billion budget. Now she is entering the world of AI, founding a start-up she says is a world-first.

“We’re the first company in the world to be able to track emotions through consumer-grade wearables with clinical-grade accuracy,” Gibson says.

InTruth has raised $9.5 million and is preparing for a public launch next year. It uses wearable technology – in Gibson’s case, a wrist-worn device a little like a FitBit – to track a user’s emotions in real time. It then gives advice on what to do about them.

InTruth was arguably the buzziest start-up at this year’s SXSW in Sydney.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

InTruth was arguably the hottest start-up to present at SXSW in Sydney earlier this month. Gibson garnered buzz around the event for her pitch: a health tech company that passively monitors a user’s emotional patterns and turns them into AI-driven insights into everyday stressors and behaviour.

Put simply, Gibson thinks we’re not good at managing our emotions, but AI can help.

InTruth founder Nicole Gibson.

The entrepreneur cites a raft of potential use cases: a police force supervisor or fire department could see their team’s emotional data and predict issues such as PTSD. An office manager might use it to measure a team’s performance and energy. A person might fall out with a close friend and use InTruth to trace when and why it occurred.

“No one’s ever done this before at scale,” she says. “We basically pull the raw data from the wearables, and we have built a machine-learning model that translates that data into emotions, that are fed back to the user. We will have the most accurate emotion-detector in the world, collecting millions of people’s emotional data. It’s going to have huge upside.”

Gibson said despite the wearables market growing rapidly in the past five years, the sector is lacking a depth of data.

“The interesting thing about emotion is that it’s 80 per cent of decision-making. So you might know that you’re sleeping badly, or you’re not training well, but until you can understand why, it’s hard to change that,” she said.

“And you can ask your friends ‘are you OK’, but if they turn around and say ‘actually, I’m suicidal’, how equipped are you to have those conversations? We think InTruth can be an AI emotion coach that knows everything about you, including what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it.”

Gibson also founded InTruth’s parent company Love Out Loud and has dedicated most of her career to tackling mental health issues. Her first company was another mental health not-for-profit, spurred by an eating disorder she experienced as a teenager. She developed a process dubbed “emotional infrastructure”, as a framework aimed at helping communities address conflict and build emotional resilience.

That work earned Gibson recognition, and eventually, a role as a National Mental Health Commissioner under the Abbott government. She was the youngest ever person to be appointed.

“Working with the commission at the highest level I could see all the gaps that weren’t being filled,” she said. “Where we’ve ended up is with a commercial tech product, but I think our purpose is a lot bigger than that.”

“We can have a more peaceful world when we are at peace with our emotions.”

Gibson is raising $9.1 million in the form of a non-dilutive grant, and is now considering whether to take further venture-capital funding before a launch of InTruth’s consumer product next year.

AI start-ups have attracted controversy for their handling of sensitive health data, and InTruth will need to prove to customers that it can be trusted. Privacy advocates have criticised local start-up Harrison.ai after revelations published by Crikey that patient scans were being used to train its AI, without their knowledge.

For Gibson, data sovereignty is crucial, and she wants the user to own their own data, rather than a doctor or anyone else. She’s also decidedly unfazed about competition from large tech giants.

A slide from InTruth’s pitch deck.

“One of the questions I get asked the most, to the point that I’m sick of handling it, is that if this is such a big opportunity, why haven’t the Whoops, the Fitbits or the Auras of the world done it?” she said.

“When you’re a company that is now an institutional leader, it’s hard to be as an adaptive and agile as a start-up.

“We’re focused on emotion. We don’t want to be the best sleep tracker, we don’t want to be the best fitness tracker. We want to be the best at tracking emotion. It’s like if you’re going to open a gourmet restaurant and being scared that McDonald’s will start selling gourmet options.”

David Swan attended SXSW as a guest of Albert’s.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.