Engineering Alumni Create Reframe App to Reduce Alcohol Abuse As studies show that the stress of the Covid-19 pandemic significantly contributes to rising alcohol consumption, two Georgia Tech alumni now offer an increasingly popular solution to curb or eliminate alcohol abuse: a sobriety app called Reframe. Since the launch of its app in fall 2020, Reframe has drawn more than 3,000 paid subscribers. The company, which has received key support from Georgia Tech’s CREATEX program for developing startups, has also attracted the attention of investors, recently completing a $1.4 million round of seed funding. Reframe’s co-founders are Ziyi Gao, who earned a bachelor’s in industrial engineering in 2017, and Vedant Pradeep, who graduated two years later with bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering and computer engineering.
John Hopkins University who believed the technology would better help with alcohol addiction, which is also a much larger market. “We realized early on that we were out of our depth, but we drew strength from reaching out to experts in this space, talking to at least 500 people,” Gao said. With a team of advising doctors and mentors from CREATE-X, Reframe has gone through multiple iterations of its app since mid-2019.
Interrupting Urges The Reframe app’s 120-day program provides diversions that interrupt users from the urge to consume alcohol during a typical 20-minute craving. The app’s Brainstorming features include games, messages, The two first got the idea for the meditations, breathing exercises, app during an introductory Chemiand a journaling component. cal Process Principles class in the “When you’re in the middle School of Chemical and Biomoof a craving, your judgment is lecular Engineering. Initially they clouded,” Pradeep said. “But it’s targeted hypoglycemia detection but easy to click a button and distract switched course when they realyourself. Reframe helps break ized that a similar product already bad habits by replacing them existed. with good things that bring balThey then turned their focus ance into life. Integrating fitness, to obsessive-compulsive disorder, nutrition, and self-care, we want which Pradeep has struggled with, to help users create lives where driving him into repetitive behaviors drinking alcohol is not considered such as rechecking the locking of helpful or attractive anymore. On doors. “When I’m in the middle of their journeys, they can track their a compulsion, I don’t know when it progress and how much money will stop, but cognitive behavioral they’ve saved from not drinking.” research shows that they typically Gao said that many people end in 20 minutes,” he said. who use the app would never go to recovery centers, which are often Expert Input expensive, or a program like Alcoholics Anonymous, which they Designing an app that would might consider stigmatic. distract users during the negative While many their app’s users habit loop of OCD episodes, Gao and Pradeep showed a product prototype might not want to seek out professional help, they still want structo doctors at Emory University and
“We’ve received hundreds of emails from people whose lives have been transformed, and that’s what we’re really proud of at this point.”
tured guidance, which is what the app provides, Pradeep said. “People want to be told what to do more than we expected.” The two entrepreneurs note that their app can put a recovery center in the user’s pocket at “one thousandth of comparable cost” of a physical facility. Goal Setting About 50 percent of Reframe’s users initially said they wanted to cut back on alcohol instead of quitting. “There haven’t been many options for that middle ground,” Gao said. But what Reframe co-founders have noticed is that many people ultimately decide to quit entirely, with about 49 percent ceasing alcohol consumption in the first 30 days. “As the program progresses, the goal becomes how to rebuild your life, addressing core issues,” Pradeep said. “It’s about the whole journey, not just about drinking. You better understand why you drink, as your triggers become more obvious.” Gao and Pradeep have plans to modify their app to address other addictions, starting with binge eating and later opioid abuse. “We want to provide tools that anyone can use for any negative behavioral habit,” Gao said. CHBE.GATECH.EDU
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