Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:00.568)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Testing Psychologist podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, licensed psychologist, group practice owner, and private practice coach. This episode is brought to you by PAR. Psychologists need assessment tools for a more diverse population these days. PAR is helping by making many of their Spanish print forms available online through PAR iConnect. Learn more at parinc.com backslash Spanish dash language dash products.
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Hey folks, welcome back to the testing psychologist. I am glad to be here as always. And today my guest is talking about a topic that I love to talk about in general, and that is technology and assessment. So my guest today is Rich Brancacho. Rich is the lead of Pearson’s newly acquired wearable technology group. He’s a school psychologist who is passionate about helping.
kids with focus and attention challenges and several years ago invented the original Revive device to help children perform to their fullest potential. So you will hear us talk about Revive a lot. That is the main topic of this interview. Revive is a wearable technology and online platform to help track and monitor and get feedback on kids and adults behavior throughout the day. So there’s a lot more to say about this and Rich is exactly
the person to share that information with us. So I won’t spoil too much. The interview, I think, is a deep dive into this technology and everything that they’re up to. And frankly, sounds quite exciting for the future of assessment. Now, things that we talk about, we talk about the background and the origin story, so to speak, of REVIBE. We talk about what it does, what it is, who it’s helpful for, some of the
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (02:20.086)
ways to utilize the data, what kind of data it gathers. And we talk about downsides, of course, and situations or folks for whom it may not be appropriate. So lots to take away from this conversation as usual. And if you have an interest in technology and assessment like I do, I think you’ll really enjoy this one. So I will take you to my conversation with Rich Brancaccio.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (02:58.542)
Rich, hey, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me today Jeremy, I’m excited to be here.
Yeah, likewise, I’m excited to chat with you. As someone who is an early adopter of all kinds of technology and just like steeped in tech and of course the AI stuff and everything in that world, I’m really excited to be chatting with you about what y’all have going on. So thanks for being here.
course.
Yes. So I’ll start with the question that I always start with. And that question is, why is this important? Why spend your time on this, spend your life on this?
Rich Brancaccio (03:33.176)
So for me, anything that can be innovated should be innovated if it helps people. And so my biggest pet peeve in life is walking by something in the city or wherever I may be and finding something that has been the same problem for years and years and years and no one does anything about it. And so I really enjoy looking at problems and trying to tackle them from a unique perspective. And I’m a big fan of tech, as you said, and AI, machine learning, and wearable technology.
I’ve taken that drive to innovate and I’ve applied it towards my other passion, which is helping kids. think helping people generally is super fun. I realized how much I enjoyed it. We’re here at APA this week, which is why I’m sitting in a hotel. I stepped away from the booth for a few minutes to come over and talk to you, but I was talking to my Uber driver and he was starting a business and I found myself trying to coach him a little bit. And it’s just interesting when you think about infusing two things that you love. So for me, it’s innovation and helping people.
Yeah, yeah, well said. I love that approach. You know, I think about that a lot and I’m going to hold myself back from just going down that rabbit hole and talking about all the different business ideas. But yeah, I love that. I love that approach and how you phrased it. Just walking around and noticing things that could be different using that as motivation. Yeah, yeah, that’s really cool. So.
That might be a good segue. I read the bio in the intro, of course, but I would love for people to hear a little bit more of your story because I think it’s a, you know, you’re a different type of guest than we might usually have. So maybe tell people about your journey to where you are now, just to provide some context.
Sure. So to go way back and then we’ll bring it up. I grew up building things and taking things apart. was really a child who liked to get something, play with it for a bit, and then I would disassemble it and build it into something new. so, you know, I’ve always had that aspect to me of curiosity and technology and wanting to enjoy that, you know, rush you get when you build something new and you create. And so I found myself to fast forward working as a school psychologist.
Rich Brancaccio (05:41.31)
and really love my job, love, again, the helping aspect. that’s a problem-solving job in and of itself, is you’re constantly solving different problems, challenges. And so I found myself in an RTI MTSS meeting one day, and we had just helped a parent with a child. I think the daughter was having some reading issues a few years prior, and so we went through the process, and it was very successful. And then the son from the same family had some attention and focus issues, and so the mother said,
why don’t you have anything better than what you’re offering me? Because we were saying, well, you can do this intervention and we can capture some data by using index cards and you can switch rubber bands from this wrist to this wrist. And she said, this is all you’ve got. And I went back home and I said, is this all we’ve got? And so I decided to do something about it. The challenge we have in the school systems and in private practice, know, the helping team, as I like to regard everybody involved with, you know.
trying to improve outcomes for children. We’re limited by the tools that we have. And most of us can’t stop and build something new. But at the time I was younger and had more time on my hands. And so I decided to build something that could help. And it was going to help in the intervention approach and also in the data collection approach. Because those are two areas that it felt a little bit like the Wild West 10 years ago. And so I built a prototype. I taught myself microelectronics.
and I was soldering chips onto circuit boards. This is before there were lot of development kits available 10, 12 years ago. So was shrinking these circuit boards down from the size of a shoe box to the size of something you could wear. But then I learned software, so I wrote some fairly basic code. I wrote some algorithms around an idea that I had, which was if we could redirect children on task without embarrassing them.
and creating a negative interaction between them and the teacher. And if we could collect data to actually empower those making decisions, and we could do it in one fell swoop, the children would benefit because they’re more focused and they’ll have better outcome. The teacher would benefit because they can focus on doing their job, which is to teach children and not have to stop every two minutes to redirect all the children who may be off task. And the school and the care team really benefits because you have more data to make better decisions. And so, yeah, that led to me just
Rich Brancaccio (08:01.454)
creating this device and trying it on a few friends and family. The first question I got was, this is great, can I have another one? I said, well, it took about 80 hours or so to build that one. Let me see what I can do. I went out and I tried to find some groups in the North Carolina area that would foster economic development. We went through an accelerator program. I started a company around this theory because the people who I showed it to said, I need that.
for my son, or my daughter, or my granddaughter, or my neighbor. So once people started to give me that feedback, it felt almost like a natural path that if I have something that can help people, I should bring it to the people who need help. So that’s how the journey began.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are a few things to touch on there and we might nerd out a little bit here just because I really can’t help myself, but I am.
I’m a huge nerd. I’m good with that.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (08:58.798)
Nice, nice. And one might argue you’re at a conference full of nerds, know, like psychologists who are interested. So I think it’s in this wheelhouse. But I’m so curious just how you went from, I see this problem to I’m soldering, you know, microchips onto circuit boards. I mean, that’s a level of maybe confidence that I don’t think a lot of us have.
Could you flesh that out a little bit? Just, I don’t know if you remember, you know, like how did you even start that, that process?
So the first thing I thought of was not to start a business, right? I was really enjoying my job as a school psych. I had never planned to change careers. To me, people who change careers, that’s for someone else. And so I just thought of the idea. And so I started to look for some other options and I had tried everything that was out there. But for our applications inside of a school, nothing was really doing the trick. I kept getting things put back in my mailbox.
Thanks for buying this, it didn’t work. We tried this other intervention, that didn’t work. And so I was talking to my dad. My dad said to me, you you grew up building things, why don’t you build your own solution? And I said, yeah, why don’t I build my own solution? And so I just started more of a curiosity. Like I wonder if I could. And like anything, if you’re, you you’re playing, you you grew up in the eighties and you’re playing Zelda video games, or just this journey or this process starts very innocently. And then once you’re in, it’s hard to get out.
because you’re really infatuated with solving the problem. so, yeah, started to just, I wonder if I could write some software to do what I was envisioning this thing would do. And I did, and it worked on a computer screen. I said, well, I wonder if I can put it onto somebody’s wrist. And so it just kind of progressed naturally.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (10:52.814)
I to, I got to, I love that. That’s a really cool, kind of remarkable story. And hopefully gives people some hope, especially considering the technology and the ability to Google things and get some help these days is way higher than it was 10 years ago, I imagine.
Yeah, if you I talked to you know, we’re as you mentioned we’re here at the APA conference with Pearson and some of the folks I’ve been speaking to have had some ideas where they I’ve always thought about doing my own thing for X or Y or Z. I tell people, you know, there’s there’s nothing stopping you from doing that if you can dedicate the time and the energy there’s a lot of resources out there and ultimately it’s going to help somebody else so start your journey.
Yeah, yeah, that’s fantastic. So now might be a good time to really dive in and tell people what this product is. Maybe there is some evolution in there of how it started versus what it’s like now, but I think it’d be great to lay the background information for folks.
So let’s unpack what revib is. So revib is short for reminder of vibration. And the thesis behind revib is, can we use a wearable device to improve on-task behavior, improve focus and attention by cueing metacognitive awareness? And so what we do is we have a wearable device. It looks like any other wearable watch, and it sends these silent vibration signals to the wrist. We pair these vibration signals with a saying, something like, when you feel this vibrate, ask yourself, I doing what I should be doing? If I am,
Good job, keep it up. Tap two times on your device, give it some input. Or if not, you were off task, just tap one time and be sure to get back to work. And so that’s the mechanism of action, if you will, of the Revive device. It’s this wearable. But there’s another component to the platform. There’s an online web app where you can go and actually view the data that this device is collecting. You can look at patterns and trends and correlations. And it auto-updates the whole thing over Wi-Fi so you can access it on.
Rich Brancaccio (12:50.358)
almost any device. And that’s a quick end to end of what the Revive platform is and what it’s
Nice, yeah, I can’t wait to dig deeper into all of this.
Excellent. So this is the actual device. And so when it vibrates, you get a little prompt like that. Screen lights up, you would touch it two times, tell it, yes, I was on task. We’ll touch it once, say no, I was off task. Then you’ve got another prompt where we would do an executive functioning reminder or text reminder as we call them, which looks like this. Comes up, we would acknowledge, yes, I did this thing or no, I’m going to snooze it. So I’ll touch that I’m going to snooze it. And then.
We have, we talked about ecological momentary assessment. So I think we can show you what that looks like as well. Again, that won’t launch at the outset, but it’ll come out shortly thereafter. So you just take your finger and you can slide this little slider back and forth. And we have different faces that’ll show to represent the mood or the feeling. And then we lock it in like that.
I like it. Yeah, simple and it looks great. Yeah, user interface.
Rich Brancaccio (13:49.688)
Thank you. Simple. The other thing we didn’t talk about, know, do kids ever, if they’re using it, ever get like a scarlet letter, sort of a concern over, what is that? Is he or she special or different? Yeah. And most times it’s not been a problem. Usually people go, well, that’s pretty cool. Can I have something? And they say, why do you wear that? Or they may be asked, why do you wear that? And most of the time children would just say, you know, it helps me in school, it keeps me on track. And that’s kind of, it is what it is.
smartwatches or watches in general are ubiquitous enough that there’s no real, you know, what is that thing? Even when we had the first one before werewolves were prevalent 10 years ago, there was really no major concerns over that. But yeah, it’s been pretty well accepted by my children and their peers.
Yeah, I can see kids being super curious about it and they turn it into something cool. mean, anything like a technology device that kids get to have in school, I’m sure is just a status symbol.
Yeah, it is very cool. And then the other thing is that we get questions about a lot. Our school doesn’t allow smart devices, know, will this be a problem? And what we’ve seen so far, know, beta testing and even with previous devices, you know, we make it very clear that this is an educational technology tool. It’s an assistive tech tool. does not do any of the things that would make it a smartwatch. You can’t access outside data. can’t communicate with people.
You can’t do music, it’s no distractions, it’s built solely to improve focus and attention and collect data. And so we’ve not had a school yet that we heard has refused once it’s been trained appropriately. And then finally, part that I think is really interesting is we are training, we just wrapped up a standardization study. So we’re training the device to actually use the sensors.
Rich Brancaccio (15:42.414)
on board to detect things like fidgeting. And so if you want to know, you know, how is this patient trending throughout the day? they getting more fidgety or are we getting more hyperactive types of behavior or less? it in the mornings? How are we looking? You can actually look and have some actual metrics around movement. You can look to see, we getting a lot of steps during academic coursework? If I see 2000 steps during math, that may not be a good thing. We may need to look to see what’s happening.
Conversely, if you see a lot of fidgeting that’s helpful, you may want to encourage more fidgeting. And the last thing that I’ll share about the platform that we’ve built, which is this watch itself, that is an intervention tool and a data collection tool. There’s a platform you sign onto, which is web-based, and you can go on your tablet or computer or phone, and you can view all this data. And some of the things that are really exciting for me, again, you mentioned that apparently we’re both nerds when it comes to technology and psychology, and I love to fuse the two of them.
together. So what’s really interesting to me as a psychologist and a technologist is that we scan all the data every few weeks and we’re always looking for patterns and trends and correlations. And so we’ll share back with users and we’ll say, did you know that when Rich took 2000 steps or more before 11 a.m. his attention span for the rest of the day is six minutes longer on average when he has that opportunity? Or did you know that when Rich
fidgets for at least 20 minutes before science, his focus rate is 18 % higher than Daisy doesn’t have that opportunity. So we’re trying to provide some concrete, actionable insights that people can use to make better decisions through data.
I love that approach. mean, this is the kind of stuff that gets me really excited about the future of our field, right? Like so many of these variables we try to rely on, even just observation or after ad hoc reporting or post hoc reporting, to have something like this in real time that’s actually gauging some kind of physiological data seems really valuable. So this is super exciting.
Rich Brancaccio (17:53.346)
I agree. think as a field, was fortunate enough, I was doing a talk last January, I believe, and the point of my discussion was to highlight for folks in our industry, psychology, psychiatry, generally speaking, the other professions have infused psychology seemingly earlier than we have. When you go to a cardiologist, they put a device on you to collect real data in real time to make decisions about.
course of treatment. And so not that we would say to use this, you know, to make a decision for course of treatment per se, but it is, as you said, nice to be able to see information. What I would consider and what I call continuous data collection or a living systematic observation. So if you wanted to know, let’s say you’ve got a student named Anthony and you want to say, how’s Anthony doing? You can say, show me mornings versus afternoons for Anthony or show me how does Anthony, how did he do last Monday when this
this happened and so you can really drill in to see specific times for people wearing the device to try to get a better understanding of what’s happening. And it’s interesting because it syncs every 15 minutes. So if you have it hooked up to Wi-Fi, you can get almost real-time data back.
Yeah, this makes me think of, you know, there’s a lot of research out there and more coming out to suggest that ADHD symptoms in particular are quite variable, both, you know, day-to-day, month-to-month, but also even on the course of years, you know, where folks appear to be almost like symptom-free for periods of several months or even years sometimes. And all that to say that, you know, symptoms can be quite context-dependent, I think. And,
This just makes me think how valuable it could be to actually have closer to real-time data and see where are these symptoms occurring more often. Even class to class is great, but I’m also curious about after school or at grandma’s versus home, in sports versus academic, if they eat breakfast, if they don’t eat breakfast. It’s all these factors that contribute to kids variability that I think we struggle to explain.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (20:02.87)
You know, as testing folks, really want things to be consistent and predictable and well, consistent. That’s probably the best word. And they often are not.
And it’s tricky, right? Because we think about when you administer a test, let’s say you give a behavioral rating scale out, you get one very, you know, I won’t say biased, but one very extreme picture from one parent or one guardian. And then you get something completely different from the other parent or guardian. And then you look at the teacher scale and you go, who do I trust? These are very different. so, you know, I think, and that’s for certain things, that’s, that’s not that problematic. We don’t see that that much, but for focus hyperactivity,
Those are things that depending, as you said, depending upon the area that we look at, who’s rating, when we’re talking about, you can get very different results in the morning versus the afternoon or on the weekends versus the weekdays. And so I think this is something where we have the opportunity to help people do their jobs better and easier and to be more accurate. And so one of the folks, have a great scientific and medical advisory board we’ve worked with over the years.
had a pediatric advisory board as well. And what I hear consistently is it’s hard for me to do my job. said for other things, it’s easier. But when it comes to focus and attention, I’m relying a lot on trying to understand what’s happening. When I’m not there, I can’t necessarily observe it in front of me, but yet I’m tasked with trying to sometimes make really important decisions as a clinician. And so the more data we can give people, whether you’re a school psychologist and we can give you, let’s say instead of
40 minutes, one time of an observation that you’re using as part of the IEP evaluation process. You do that, maybe you trim it back a little bit. Maybe you do 15 or 20 minutes of in-classroom observation, and then you pull some unwearable data to supplement that or to bolster it. And if you’re a clinician and you’re trying to just get an understanding of like, where does this child fit or this adult fit in the continuum of my other patients, it’s helpful to have some metrics to look at.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (22:06.69)
Yeah, absolutely. Let me get into some logistics real quick and then I want to keep asking some rabbit hole questions. But who do you think, who’s the target market for this? Is it the parents? Is it the school? Is it clinicians?
So this product was designed to work for all of those folks you just mentioned. So schools, clinicians, families, it’s considered a qualification so all of the above can purchase it through Pearson. But we’ve seen a lot of schools who have said, we’re looking for a better way to collect data and to provide research-based intervention to improve focus and attention, complete work or improve work completion. And we’re looking for better ways to collect data because the schools
have a very daunting job of making these decisions with, again, sort of the same limited data that all of us have to work with. And so we see this as a tool for schools to make better decisions with less resources required to collect all the data or to intervene on the intervention side. For parents, a lot of them have shared with us, we’re looking for something to help. I’m not comfortable with other interventions that have been looked at.
I’m not comfortable trying this or I tried that and it didn’t work. And so a lot of families take matters into their own hands and say, I want to start to try something that’s very low level in terms of invasiveness, which is something you’re wearing on your wrist. It provides a vibration. The vibrations are very short. They’re powerful. They’re between three quarters of a second to under three seconds. So they tend to not become annoying, which is good. We don’t want to annoy our users.
And we tell people you should probably wear it on your dominant wrist so that your non-dominant hand can actually tap. If you want to provide feedback, it won’t stop you from handwriting. So it blends right into a school environment. And then finally, clinicians. And I’ve heard some really great feedback at APA this morning. This is the first day of APA. This was today. And so just hearing from clinicians, many of whom are in private practice, been really excited.
Rich Brancaccio (24:13.742)
This was the first day we’ve actually unveiled the product in public, was here at APA. And so to hear people’s feedback was terrific. Things I heard this morning were, I need more insight into what’s happening with my patient because there’s this lack of communication that occurs between the patient, the parent, and the teacher. And if I can have a portal or a gateway to see what’s going on and I can monitor it, then when they come to session, I’m ready to talk about it. I can look and I can.
set things up to be able to say, ask you to provide feedback. We’re going to have an option probably about a month after launch called EMA inquiry, where essentially it’s ecological momentary assessment. You can program whatever you want to ask your patient to say, it’s nine o’clock. I want to know how is your level of anxiety this morning? Or it’s four o’clock. I want to know how’s your level of energy? Let’s say you’re looking to see.
appetite or energy or any of these questions that we want to pick up and do so in a really quick, easy fashion that you can look at and store and review. And that’s really the name of the game for us is we’re trying to impart positive change and also really smoothly collect data that can be viewed and utilized.
Right, right. Is this, you know, the whole time we’ve been talking, I pictured this for kids, but what is the actual age range of clients or students or people who might have been…
So anyone can use the device. The sweet spot traditionally has been the 8 to 12 group because there’s a lot of challenges and a lot of things kind of surface around academic concerns in that age range. Mostly children from second grade or so right through high school or college. We’ve had a lot of adult users too, right? We’ve had these past versions which occurred before it was under the Pearson banner.
Rich Brancaccio (26:09.774)
And we had a lot of adult users who would share, know, I grew up as a child with ADHD and I didn’t outgrow some of my challenges. And so they use it as well. The oldest user we have on record, we had a physician from the Mayo Clinic who bought one for his father who needed to be reminded to do certain things. He was 103 years old. So we’ve said that we’ve seen it used from three to 103, but yeah, the sweet spot is eight to 12. And we just did a norming exercise to standardize some of the fidgeting.
metrics and so train the model for fidgeting metrics. And so that age group when we roll this product out is going to be from seven to 13. But again, anyone can use it. That’s just the age group that we would say here that the norms that we’re comfortable sharing, you know, normative data for terms of fidgets, but it works equally well on the intervention side from everybody we’ve seen thus far.
That sounds great, yeah. So you mentioned being able to compare data within a person or a kid, let’s say, throughout the day. Are you also doing any kind of between kid comparison in the sense that you’re developing like a, I don’t know, I’m not a statistician or test developer, but almost like a norm group for fidgeting or other behaviors and that kind of thing?
Absolutely. So what’s been fun about this project, you we’ve been working on this here at Pearson for about a year. And there was development done even before that time, but we’ve really tried to take our time and build a really great product that we feel excited to share with everybody. And so with that, traditionally, as you know, Pearson and other test developers will spend a really long time building an amazing tool. The BASC, the WISC, all these terrific tools, but those tools, maybe the team spends
three, four, five years working on it or more. And then you won’t see another one or any changes made for several years, a decade, sometimes give or take. This is one of the first products, if not the first, to my knowledge, Pearson where we’ve gotten the green light to do things differently. And so we are going to roll this out as what I would call a rolling launch, meaning we have a baseline of a lot of great things that the device does, but we’re gonna continue every quarter.
Rich Brancaccio (28:23.214)
to continue building new features, new functions, more research. So the norms are something that will come out at some point, probably a few months after launch. We have the data, we’re working on it as we speak, but we didn’t want to slow things up for things like that or the ecological momentary assessment. So a few things that we have that’ll come out shortly, but we’re really excited to bring the product out the way it is. So for now, it’s gonna be somewhat as, if you wanna think about it, it’s an intra-individual snapshot of somebody, and then we’ll have.
some comparison groups quickly.
Great, great. And we talked a lot about, or a few times about fidgeting metrics, which is cool. That to me seems easy-ish from what I know about the device and the technology. How does that compare to more inattentive or just off task or unfocused behavior? there any way that you’re getting at the less hyperactive or fidgety stuff?
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Dr. Jeremy Sharp (30:22.04)
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What we’ve done is we have a two part approach. The fidgeting part, it’s actually very, very difficult when you’re training the machine learning models to identify. we’ll start with fidgeting. What we’ve done is we’ve identified fidgeting as something that we consider the operational definition was something that’s cyclical, repetitive, but it’s non academically functional. Meaning something like handwriting fits the bill. It’s cyclical, it’s repetitive. It looks similar if you watch the graphs that we can see behind the scenes.
But we’ve trained the model to differentiate handwriting, which is academically functional, to put that in one bucket. And we’ve trained it to understand and recognize that this is fidgeting, which is non-functional from a traditional viewpoint. There actually is some interesting, and I’ll share in a few minutes, some interesting metrics for each person. Sometimes fidgeting is really helpful. It’s almost a compensatory strategy, if you want to think about it like that. And then some people, in some times of day, it’s unhelpful and you want to try to provide something different.
So we train the model to use these sensors where we’re looking to identify these fidgeting behaviors and to quantify them. And then we can say this person spent this many minutes a day or in the morning or this month, this class fidgeting. And so we feel really comfortable and it’s easy to collect that data because it’s in the background, it’s passive. So in terms of active data collection where there’s some part on the user that they have to provide feedback on, that’s where we collect data on inattention, know, focus rate.
Rich Brancaccio (32:37.39)
meaning on task versus off task. So we take this self-report, something we call digital self-report. So we’re asking people in real time to give us the feedback on the watch. And so we’re saving and we earmark all the responses that we get. And so we create a map, if you will, of what attention looks like as this person is sharing throughout the day. Yes, I’m on task, no, I’m off task. So then we say that this person had a, you know, they’re…
The maximum amount of time they could have been potentially on task and focused was from here to here. What was that average for this day or this hour or this month? And that gives you some understanding around, you know, is this person able to focus better in mornings versus the afternoons or they struggle in one subject. A lot of children and adults with ADHD do really, really well with things that they are interested in and that they’re strong within, but they tend to really struggle in things that are either maybe not interesting or they have a hard time with from an attention and focus perspective.
So we didn’t want to use something like a galvanic skin response because if you’re judging focus using something like that, you may be very, very focused on the wrong thing. And so you can show extremely high levels of focus because the person is like really intently thinking about the Carolina Hurricanes hockey game last night. what we’ve decided to do is put that into the hands of the user. And so we looked at some.
Meta-analyses over time and we’ve looked at our own data. Children and adults are surprisingly good reporters of on task, off task. We’ve made sure to incentivize them to provide feedback. Through PBIS models, we have fun badges and animated things that pop up on your wrist to celebrate. But we never ever try to incentivize people to have a higher focus score or not. We don’t want to incentivize people to give us incorrect feedback. And when the users find out, even younger children,
that the more they honestly answer, the better the device helps them. It really motivates them to be quite honest. And when we look at the data, we spread it all out, we look at it, we’re not seeing any kind of patterning that would be suggestive of people being untruthful or skewing the data towards always being on task.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (34:49.356)
Yeah, I love that. mean, that’s a concern. I thought about that early on. If we’re relying on self-report, how are folks actually handling that and kids especially?
Yeah, it’s a great question. And we really try to be proactive in how we come up with things and what the rationale was. What’s interesting too, that you could think about, I asked a child once who was an early user and I said, how do you answer the device? And they said, I tell it the truth. And I said, well, why is that? And they said, well, you told us that if you answer it wrong, it doesn’t really help you. And I liked that it helps me. And then the child said something I thought was interesting, which I always think about. And they said, even if I were to tell,
the device I was off task, it’s still going to make me think about what I’m doing right now and I’m going to get back to work. So I said, great, the outcome is one and the same for the therapy benefit. we have a lot of happy users over the years who have shared things. We just did a trial, as I mentioned earlier, which was really rewarding to do to get to meet some children and train the model. But one of the participants came up to me and she said,
I drove three and a half hours here and I’ll drive three and a half hours when I go home tonight. And I said, wow, you know, why, why did you make such a long track? and she said, well, we’ve been using the device since my son was in second grade and he’s going into, I think he was going to seventh or eighth grade. And she said, I want to get, a device as early as I can because you know, he, really benefits from it. And so, that’s something that’s been special to us to have long standing relationships where, know, and I try to.
to think about things as I talk to people about Revab that I think they should know. if there are questions about, you know, would people habituate to this quickly? The answer is, you know, we haven’t seen that happen. We have some users who have been using it for three, four years and continue to use it. And some people, you know, who are using it for less time and it won’t be for everybody. You know, you’ll get somebody occasionally who will say, I just don’t want to wear something on my wrist or I don’t feel like using this. But, you know, I think
Rich Brancaccio (36:53.494)
over 80 % of users wind up using it and continuing to use it. So it’s been a really good experience for us.
Yeah, yeah, I love that. was going to ask if there are any cool stories or feedback that really stands out from users. It sounds like that’s one of them. Are there any others that come to the top of your mind?
Yeah, what was interesting is we’ve had some people who have shared information with us, like, you know, we’ve had a family who’s been using it for a long time and they said, we actually, we stopped using it. And we said, how come? You was it not helpful? And they said, no, was really helpful. We just, went from five days a week to four days a week to three days a week. And eventually we just, you know, he learned to be more self-aware. So he checks his own thoughts and behaviors and his teachers are sharing that he’s on task now. And so.
Now these are the kind of things that I start to, for our research plans, start to look at, you know, longitudinally. I’d love to traction people over time and see what this looks like over years and years. But it’s, to be really candid, it’s for a minimally invasive intervention, again, vibrating on your wrist. And there’s a lot of technology, obviously, behind this, algorithms and it’s learning and personalizing and everything, but at face value to send a vibration to somebody’s wrist, I’ve been floored.
with the level of improvement that we’ve seen. We’ve seen from some of the studies, we get a moderate to large effect size on the intervention side, which if you asked me 10 years ago, would we be able to do something like that from something so innocuous? I would say probably not, but some people really respond well to it. I think as you said earlier, it speaks to the fact that we see some similarities in children with ADHD, with autism, all these different things where you’ll have focus and attention challenges.
Rich Brancaccio (38:36.994)
These children typically are really motivated to do well. They want to try their best. They want to be on task. They want to do well in school, but they just, you know, there’s a puzzle piece here or there that just needs to get filled in to help them get there. And so they’ve told us anecdotally, it’s the vibrations we get that are the little puzzle pieces that we fill in to kind of get us where we go.
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask you about research. You know, it’s my nice segue into that since you mentioned studies and outcome effect sizes and that kind of thing. Just tell me, mean, my audience clearly is interested in research support for any intervention. So give me an idea of what that looks like thus far. What kind of research have you all done? What’s it showing?
So we’ve done over the last several years, we’ve done seven studies to date. We’ve done blinded studies, we’ve done open studies, we’ve done in school, in the real world assessment. We’ve done things that are decentralized where we’re just sending devices home and we’re using rating scales to give feedback. equal interest in both because I think there’s value in both. think sending observers into the classroom, three days a week to track children in their natural environment.
is very meaningful. think doing things like we’ve done where we have a simulated classroom environment, very, very helpful to get information from there. And then, you know, sending them into the real world and just getting parent feedback only, you know, just anecdotal feedback only is really valuable. And so when we look at the gestalt of the research, what we see is whether it’s open or it’s blind, whether it’s parent or teacher or observer, we’re getting improvements that, as I mentioned,
moderate to large effect sizes that are consistently improving focus and attention symptoms with long-standing impact. So we’re seeing what we would consider to be far transfer, where this is making a difference for these children. Again, I mentioned this child earlier who stopped using it after a while. And so in terms of these studies, we’re statistically significant improvements across
Rich Brancaccio (40:44.442)
nearly all areas, even in some areas that we’ve been surprised to see. And I can highlight that a little bit because I think it may be interesting for your listeners. But when we see things, significant improvements in areas of focus and attention, that makes sense. We see improvements in work completion. We’ve done things like the whiffers and looking at some more academic side of things. So we’re seeing improvements both in attention and focus. We’re seeing improvements in academic functioning. We’re seeing improvements in social interactions.
which was interesting for me to learn. And also, in some of the scales like hyperactivity, which was really fascinating for me to learn because that wasn’t the original thesis. The original thesis was, keep kids on task, they’ll be able to have more academic engaged time because they’re spending more time listening, sitting in their seat, less time looking out the window or doodling or thinking of things that they shouldn’t be thinking about during instruction. And what we learned, drilling into this, we’ve had some really
amazing people that have been on our scientific medical advisory board. So we’ve had Cecil Reynolds, others at the BAS, we’ve had Margaret Weiss, KOL and ADHD, of the best in the business. And Dr. Greg Mattingly was on there as well, giving us some really amazing feedback, again, one of the best in the business. And so when we looked at some of these data points and we were trying to figure out how is this translating into that, what we learned was
if you’re in a better position to do what you’re supposed to do, then you’re not doing these other things that tend to inflict or cause challenges around social interaction. So if you’re not getting up and talking to your neighbors, if you’re a child in school, then you’ll have less negative interactions because you’re spending more time doing your work, they’re doing their work. And that’s where a lot of these negative interactions come from. same thing goes for the hyperactivity scales that we looked at.
How are we improving hyperactivity? Well, we looked at the parent and teacher rating scales, particularly teachers. If we’re getting the children in their desks more, meaning they’re standing up less and leaving to walk around or to go talk to people, the teachers are rating them as less movement, less hyperactivity, kind of doing things they shouldn’t be doing. They’re not moving, like you’re driven by a motor and all these terms that we use. And so that’s how we’re seeing this more global impact.
Rich Brancaccio (43:05.624)
helping you improve your focus and attention and bolstering these executive skills that go along with it.
I gotcha, I gotcha. Yeah, this is so cool. I I am really interested in the EMA component. You mentioned that a little bit ago and I wanted to come back to it because I’m just personally very interested in that dimension of things. So, I mean, I guess we’re talking about EMA generally and as far as checking in with kids throughout the day. But you specifically mentioned like, I think anxiety was an example. Can you tell me any more about how
You might be utilizing it for ecological momentary assessment.
Sure, what we’ve thought about, and this goes along with the innovation side, especially using, we have this, as I mentioned, at Samsung that’s terrific, and so they let us take over this watch and it excludes everything. can’t text message or get music or do anything that you shouldn’t be doing. It’s solely an educational technology device, assistive tech device. And so it’s very flexible and we can do almost anything, which is wildly exciting to have a pilot like that.
And I’ve always said for the last decade, you know, we’re fusing psychology and technology. And so what’s exciting about that is we can take this device, which is originally, you know, see your eyes around just focus and attention, improving work completion and academic engaged time. And we start to look at it and we started to say, well, I wonder if we can just send some text reminders, you know, not text messages, but text reminders to help with executive function. And it was wildly popular with children, adults.
Rich Brancaccio (44:41.006)
parents, teachers, because again, they’re having to redirect folks less and they have more independence and they’re coming out with better outcomes because they didn’t forget to write their homework down. They didn’t forget to bring their diorama to school that day. And so then this moved into the next category of, we can do anything we want on this watch, can’t we? We can, it’s a touchscreen, we can build a slider, we can build some fun animations and I can, if it’ll show up on the screen, I’ll show you a sneak peek of what it looks like.
But we decided that there’s a lot of things we can do to gain information. The complaint that we heard from folks was, even when I progress monitor, I’m doing that a couple times a month, depending if it’s reading or if it’s behavior, maybe a weekly basis. But clinicians have said, I want more data more frequently. And our thought in our internal team was, well, we can do it really quickly. It could be very innocuous. It doesn’t distract. doesn’t.
flag any of the students around you or peers if you’re an adult wearing it. But we can take this data and can save it and we can show this and assemble all these different data points to give something more representative about this person. And so you can personalize or you will be able to personalize these EMA queries where you can say whatever the account owner is. So the account owner is the school or the parent or.
clinician, they can program it to say, how are you feeling right now? And we have these dynamic faces that will change. It makes it very easy to slide this scale around. And you can go from a one to a five and share how you’re feeling, how did you sleep last night? Do you have any anxiety right now? We have some other things in the works that are exciting as well that will leap off of this. But that’s the first thing for us is to really allow some flexibility to give.
practitioners in particular, more data about what’s happening in their patients day to day life.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (46:33.602)
This is great. We’ve talked, I think, lot about a lot of the positive. I can see a ton of potential for this. And in some of my offline conversations with the Pearson folks was even thinking, you know, how can we utilize this as practitioners? You know, could we do an intake, an eval intake for a kiddo and then send them home with this device for a couple of weeks and then get it back with some real world data?
to integrate into the evaluation process. You know, that was one idea that came to mind. So I see tons of potential for this.
Jeremy, I’ll tell you what’s fun. I’ve been at Pearson about a year now, almost a year. I used Pearson products when I was a school psych and I was a big Santa beforehand, but the people at Pearson is, I know you know some of them very closely. Everybody’s here for the same reason. Everybody’s really driven to build tools that help people and help the people who are helping those people. And so we’ve had this really fun opportunity. We meet with the different teams around Pearson and we’re always looking for what’s next.
What do we do with this? How can we advance the science of tests and assessment using this technology? One of the things I heard at the booth this morning at the APA conference was, and I heard this consistently, which was, I take it as a compliment to Pearson. They said, I’m shocked. And I said, what are you shocked about? And everybody said, I never pictured Pearson getting into the wearables space, into the technology space like this. And then I said, how does that resonate with you? And they said, it’s.
great, we need to advance as a community of practitioners. We need to see what’s next. We can’t keep using the same things over and over forever. We can keep those things around because they’re great and they’re validated and they’re terrific tools, but we should start to expand as technology gives us a bigger palette to paint with, we should start expanding the size of our mural. That was the feeling this morning at APA and I think that’s the feeling, know, ubiquitously appears and everybody’s excited to be able to do some new things.
Rich Brancaccio (48:36.588)
the future.
Yeah, yeah, I’m excited to hear that. Now, we do have to talk about potential downsides because I feel like, you know, this is, it’s going to come up for folks and just, you know, full disclosure, when they pitched this idea to me, however many months ago and just, know, okay, what do you think about that? As a parent of two teenagers in middle school, my very first thought was how many kids are losing this device, you know? And maybe this is just my kids, maybe not, but…
You know, that’s just one example to kind of start off and be funny about it. curious, yeah, how do you handle that kind of thing? Kids losing it, misplacing it, not wearing it. And maybe we can talk about other potential downsides to it.
So, and again, I’m really transparent. I love to just be as forthright as possible with pros and cons, right? Because if you’re wondering it, someone else is wondering it, I’d rather just really share everything that we think about and how we approach the pros and the cons, as you mentioned. So it is an expensive device, right? It’s built on a Samsung Galaxy 7. It’s not a cheap piece of hardware. So what we’ve heard from families and from schools, from practitioners is I’m a little bit
concerned about what a child might do to an expensive piece of hardware or electronics. And so what we’ve done to try to mitigate that is instead of just putting them out the door and that’s it, we have a subscription that we’re going to launch with. And it’s going to be a subscription model where we provide as part of the subscription, we provide the watch as part of it. And so it includes the hardware itself, the platform I mentioned earlier, we can go online on the Reevi.
Rich Brancaccio (50:20.396)
web app, can view the data, share it, it’ll put out a one touch report PDF, which summarizes the last six weeks of data for progress monitoring, for some database decision making exercises. And so it does all that, but also includes a replacement warranty. So if you crack the screen, rip the band, it gets run over by the school bus or the family minivan, you mail us back the pieces and we send you a new one for free. And so for that, we’re charging $400 per device.
per year, depending upon how long that you will sign up for a subscription for. But for most people, and we did a lot of research to try to understand what’s the best way to approach something like this, because it’s so new, right? It’s novel. Most people don’t put a wearable on a child. Adults, obviously, it’s less concerning if you’re an adult user, but that’s the solution that most groups that you mentioned felt the most comfortable with is it gets damaged, we send it back, we get a new one. And so that alleviates, I think, lot of the concern for people.
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Have you had any pushback from folks about wearing, potentially wearing two devices? I just think about like the ubiquity of Apple watches and, you know, me personally, I have a running watch, you know, like a fitness watch that’s also kind of a smartwatch. Like, have you had any pushback around that?
So that’s more I would say middle school to adult users would potentially have that kind of a concern the second to you know Seventh-grade crowds not really wearing devices right now But what’s nice about this is again what we have this great relationship with Samsung So we have the ability to throttle certain things so we could and may Start to unlock some of the features for let’s say an adult user says hey I want to use this for exercise we may wind up
unlocking some of the features at certain times when it’s not a focus time to allow them to have more usability out of the watch beyond just this kind of education technology assistive tech tool.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (52:17.166)
Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, that’s super interesting. So starting to wrap up a little bit, you mentioned, of course, this new version, new product is coming out here soon. By the time this goes live, we might be in real time. It may be released very, very soon. What else, what are you most excited about with the new product or new developments? Anything else that you might share that is on the horizon?
I think for me, I’ve mentioned the word, know, palette a few times as we’ve been talking. And I think there’s a lot of creativity that goes with innovation. And to come to a place like Pearson where innovation is embraced and we have the resources, the people, the skill, the knowledge, the technology to be able to build things that help people without the constraints that we faced in the past. I ran a startup company for 10 years.
And so you are always picking and choosing. You have to do this or this, that or this. And so to come to Pearson, who gave us a clear directive of we want to innovate. We want to lead the way in wearable in terms of intervention, behavioral data collection. The support that we’ve received at Pearson has been tremendous. A lot of excitement around what we’re doing. And to be able to collaborate with people and to really, I think, hopefully,
infuse a paradigm shift in the mental health space around, as you said earlier, Jeremy, to infuse this paradigm shift into we shouldn’t guess or assume or hope when we can, you know, track, view and interpret, right? Those are much better building blocks to start decision-making when it comes to anything clinical. So that’s what I’m excited about is just giving people better tools to do more with less to drive better outcomes for their patients.
Nice. So I might close with a personal question. That question is, at this point in your life, would you consider yourself more of a school psychologist or more of a technologist slash entrepreneur?
Rich Brancaccio (54:22.776)
So yeah, my journey started as a school psychologist, had zero intention of ever leaving the field or heading into the world of business and technology. But I think I’ll always consider myself to be a school psych. I was in the profession for 10 years, tested thousands of kids, and you just can’t leave that behind, nor would I want to. I think it’s a part of who I am. But I think as you grow and relationships, your friendships are…
hopefully the same as they were when you’ve had childhood friends for five, 10, 20 years. You’re the same friends, but you’ve all expanded your interests. And so I think it’s kind of like that. think I’ve expanded my view and my ability to build tools for people now on a grander scale. So I think I’m always going to be a school psych. Even though I’m not testing and helping kids directly, I’m still able to build some tools that will help other school psychs and clinical psychologists, psychiatrists. I think we can build tools that help other people. And so in that regard, I’ll always consider myself.
to be somebody in the field.
Yeah, I love that. I think that’s the best best case scenario, right? Like you retain those parts of yourself and you know, they just get woven into whatever new new identities you might assume. Especially in this case, it comes in really handy to have that clinical side and know where your users are coming from. I think that’s really valuable.
Yeah, it’s been fun to be able to, even here at the conference this week, it’s been fun to be able to connect with people and to be able to answer questions about, you know, like, tell me about the artificial intelligence that you use to build this. How does that work? And also talk about the whisk or the bask. And so it’s good. it’s, lot of people at Pearson are very similar. I’ve noticed many of my colleagues were clinical psychologists, school psychologists, occupational therapists.
Rich Brancaccio (56:08.514)
physical therapist, so everybody seems to have a lot of familiarity with the products that we build and sell, which has been great.
Nice, nice. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time away from the conference to come and chat with me here for a little while and happy to give folks some exposure to this product. We’ll make sure to put the links in the show notes for folks to find it and learn more and purchase if they would like to. And I think you all have put together some kind of giveaway for my audience, which people always love. Is that right?
That’s correct. We’re going to go ahead and we’re going to allow one of your lucky listeners to enter to win a free Revive device and they will get a year of service to go with it. And we’re excited to hopefully improve their focus attention and give them some more data points to better understand either themselves or perhaps their patient, child or student.
Yeah, that sounds great. People love free stuff always. so, yeah, like I said, we’ll make sure to put the link to sign up in the show notes.
I appreciate it Jeremy, thanks for having me and appreciate the opportunity. Hopefully we see each other at a conference in the future.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (57:18.35)
That sounds great. All right, y’all. you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes. So make sure to check those out. If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out the testing psychologists mastermind groups. have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at
testingpsychologist.com slash consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (58:42.008)
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