83% of people around the world are feeling stressed, but only 14% feel comfortable talking to someone about it. With symptoms often invisible, Stress can escalate until it manifests into serious illnesses that can be life-threatening. According to the UN, stress-related illnesses contribute to nearly 5 million deaths a year.

As leaders in Stress Care, Cigna challenged us to help them find a way to make that first act of talking about stress more approachable for all.

We needed to develop tech innovation that would remove the barrier of fear in approaching your doctor, your manager, or any other initial human interaction that might stop someone from acting on their stress. If we could find an attractive way for these silent suffers to make an initial action and connect them to vital stress education and resources, we could change lives, and change the way people talk about stress.

StressWaves by Cigna is the world’s first voice-activated stress diagnostic tool that analyses your current level of stress by you simply talking into your phone. This revolutionary new voice detection technology works on all mobile devices. All it takes is 60 seconds and a quiet place to talk. Once your current level is detected, tailored advice and resources are shared to help you take stress care action. StressWaves is possible thanks to breakthrough research revealing that your voice is now one of the earliest indicators of stress and mental health issues affecting the body. StressWaves is able to gather voice data and for the first time break down a person’s speech patterns to understand what their body is telling us about their stress levels. StressWaves pushes regular check-in reminders and content material to keep users managing their stress levels to create regular stress care behaviour.

Cigna has spent over three years striving to be recognised as a leader and innovator in the field of stress care. With findings showing a lack of confidence to share stress issues with a human, we needed to find an easily accessible way to make the behaviour of acting on stress less socially public and far more approachable - particularly Cigna's key audience, globally mobile individuals, who were seeing higher levels of stress due to lockdowns, family distance and difficulty operating their work roles remotely because of travel restrictions. If we could succeed in making this approach quick, unintrusive and muiti-device friendly, we would be able to proactively democratise stress care for people around the world, helping them to act on and manage their stress before it turns into serious illness.

Speech requires complex control in the nervous system, and the underlying pathways in the brain can be affected by stress-related issues.

StressWaves asks you a series of questions as it listens to you speak for 60 seconds.

The A.I. then combines machine-learning and transfer learning techniques, to detect both acoustic and word-based patterns in voice.

This is possible because the algorithm was initially fed millions of conversations from “non-stressed” people to mine for pitch, cadence, enunciation.

Data scientists then added conversations, mental health data and clinical papers on stress to “teach” StressWaves how to identify Stress.

StressWaves then works in tandem with Cigna’s award-winning Stress Visualisation scale to process your current stress level.

Based on a user's stress reading, StressWaves produces a tailor-made access point to selected free tools and content to facilitate an easy next step.

Visualisations can be downloaded, progress tracked and shared online to inspire others.

Over half a million tool users in the first 5 months.

90% of completions gave their email address to continue their stress care journey

1 in 5 users continue to use StressWaves regularly

Repeat users spend an average of 3 minutes with StressWaves

Now under FDA consideration to be recognized as standardized diagnostic

StressWaves' A.I. gets more accurate at detecting stress with each new user, meaning chronic stress will continue to be detected and treated earlier.