Greater Bay Area Start-Ups: Wellness App Promotes Mental Health

The company’s 5P Medicine app is designed to help users relieve emotional stress and mood disorder by practising mindfulness meditation. Explaining the app, Jin said: “Take women for example. We have designed courses to help women deal with pressures occurring in different phases of their life. These include emotional problems in the workplace; prenatal anxieties and postnatal depression; parent-and-child relationship; as well as the more common disorders such as insomnia, anxiety and depression.

“There are many critical moments in women’s lives that are closely related to emotions. In view of this, our products and services aim to help people ‘avert pain’ on the one hand and ‘embrace happiness’ on the other.”

Jin noted the disconnect between improving material wealth and declining mental health, saying: “In modern society, the living standards of many people may be high, but their quality of life is low due to various emotional and psychological problems. Hence, in helping people ‘avert pain and embrace happiness’, 5P Medicine is designed not to cure physical illness but emotional distress.”

AI-enhanced services

Before launching the 5P Medicine app, Jin’s company mainly focused on offline classes. When asked why they switched online, Jin explained: “We used to be an offline training institute¹, but then it occurred to us that many of these meditation exercises and psychology courses should also have an audio version for convenience. We therefore launched an app in 2018 which mainly provides an audio version for practising meditation.

“Later, as we found that it was very important to digitise the course content, so we set up a cloud computing start-up named Xinliu in December 2019 digitising our courses using the internet and big data. Now we are also in the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) to provide users with enhanced personalised services.”

Currently, 5P Medicine users are mostly from Chinese-speaking markets including mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. Jin said: “Users on the mainland are mainly the general public, while the majority of users in other markets are professionals. Since there are not many companies offering non-medical mental health services in the mainland, we have attracted a large number of people to join our courses. As we have organised training courses in many places such as Guizhou and Yunnan and the response from the participants has been positive, our services gradually became widely known by word of mouth.

“At present, there are two major groups of participants in our courses. The first are professionals such as psychologists and university psychology teachers who wish to gain an understanding of the stress and emotion related problems of the general public through our courses. The second group are people who seek help from these practising psychologists and psychology teachers and are referred to the courses by them.”

To date, the 5P Medicine app has about 100,000 users, many of whom are regulars. Although some of the user groups are from Tibet, Guizhou, Qinghai, Gansu, Hunan and Hubei, the company’s future market development focus will be on the Greater Bay Area (GBA). Jin said: “The GBA has a population of over 86 million, which is larger than that of many European countries. As life pressures increase, many people need psychological support in order to manage their emotions and enhance their quality of life. At the present stage, our development goal targets the cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan and Foshan.”

However, Covid-19 has dampened business growth. Jin said: “The pandemic has dealt a serious blow to our business. Our company income used to be derived from online and offline operations. But due to the pandemic, teachers from abroad cannot come to China to give lessons and so all offline courses and activities have been suspended. Meanwhile, income from online courses and activities is not too steady.”