heyvie: Helping people to get relieved from chronic pains
Meet Marius and Hady: The founders have created an app that helps people get rid of their migraine and other pain issues through neurocentric training.
Almost 40 percent of adult Germans suffer from headaches several times a month, according to Statista. The severity can vary: Some feel only a slight pressing behind the eye, others suffer from severe migraine with aura. In both cases, the statistics vary greatly, because these people rarely make use of health insurance benefits and are usually only absent from work for a short time. However, their own quality of life is massively diminished when they are affected by headaches.
The startup heyvie wants to provide relief — it is a digital product for neurocentric training. The app aims to help solve chronic pain and provides relief for migraine sufferers, for example. “We do this by looking at the user’s brain and seeing which area in it is underactivated and on which side of the brain this is the case,” explains Marius Krämer, co-founder of Heyvie. The idea behind it: Different exercises can take the load off the brain and prevent migraines — which often occur as a stress reaction to overuse. “Migraines are a protective mechanism of the body to a brain that is overworked or overloaded. By reducing the stressors, we prevent migraines from occurring in the first place. We are leveraging the mechanism that made the headache necessary for the brain,” Marius says.
It sounds medical and complex, but it’s simple for users to apply and costs only a little time. Of course, Marius and his Co-Founder Hady Daboul do not really look in one’s brain, since they are no brain surgeons. But they found a different way to find out what’s going on up there.
First, the app requires a movement test and answers to some questions from its user to find out which areas of the brain need to be focused. For example, users are asked to indicate in which direction their tongue points when they stick it out. Its direction can be correlated to brainstem activity, which plays a role in migraine. After completing the tests, the technology behind the app calculates the neurocentric profile and gives exercises that activate just these areas.
“The exercises only cost a few minutes of time a day and may feel unfamiliar at first, for example, we ask our users to rub their right ear to access the left brainstem via the vagus nerve,” says Marius. “Or the app instructs to close the eyes completely once to shut down the visual system.” All of these exercises cause the brain to be more evenly loaded and thus unloaded.
Marius’ co-founder Hady studied medicine in Bonn and completed training as a neurocentric trainer at an academy in the United States. “Hady and I have known each other since our school days. He brings medical expertise, I focus on the implementation in the app,” Marius says. Their desire is to make these pain-relieving exercises accessible not just to a few people who might be able to afford a personal neurocentric trainer, but to as many as possible who suffer from pain. Marius says, “We don’t want to help just 100 people a year, but millions if possible!” In 2022, heyvie goes live in the spring after beta testing, which got great feedback.
Follow heyvie’s journey on LinkedIn.
