Three or four times a week, whenever he needs to calm his mind, Steve Mills launches the Healium AR app on his iPhone. His favourite spot to use it is in a park on the banks of the slowly churning Mississippi River in Memphis, Tennessee.
“It’s cumulative, it builds up over time but you learn how to deal with it. I have several outlets. Healium AR is one of them.”
Around the same time, in another part of the country, television journalist Sarah Hill was also confronting anxiety, beginning a chain of events that would lead her to develop Healium AR.
Tarrant designed a program for Hill to use at home with a laptop and electrodes. She had to keep an animated airplane above a specific threshold on the screen. When she succeeded, it was because she was calming her frontal lobe brain activity, which includes the ACC.
Both Hill and Tarrant are quick to point out that Healium AR is not a replacement for medical therapy or medication. Over the last few years, Tarrant has published three studies with a fourth on the way showing that the app can reduce anxiety and increase a feeling of well-being for users in as little as four minutes.