How these 2 brothers seek to spread happiness and improve well-being, one app at a time

If you are reading this, chances are that you might doing so on your smartphone — one of the millions of Indians to be owning one. From replacing alarm clocks and music players to a becoming a go-to knowledge portal, the smartphone has become an indispensable part of our lives. But its increased usage, has given rise to multiple health and wellness-related problems.

Reports from Forbes and RescueTime suggest that mobile app usage can cause a loss of more than 40 percent of an average professional's work efficiency. Multiple reports have shown a direct and causal relationship between the dependence on technology and reduced feelings happiness and well-being.

The origin of NineLives

Two young brothers, Jayesh and Jagrit Surisetti, took cognisance of this twin problem of achieving digital well-being and happiness and co-founded their venture, NineLives Technology Solutions to create solutions.

The brothers sought to develop apps that strive to make people’s lives better by enabling them to take charge of their lives by reducing their dependency on smartphones and technology. When Jayesh and Jagrit put their heads together on how to solve this problem, two objectives arose: To enable people to improve their digital well-being and help them take better charge of their happiness.

The result? Two tech solutions - Apprison and Happea.

Apprison: The digital well-being solution

Apprison is India’s first gamified digital well-being and productivity app that works as a ‘Prison for apps,’ where the user is the judge that sends apps that are guilty of distracting them to prison. Apprison has been downloaded by more than 10,000 users from Google Play and is steadily growing.

"With Apprison, we wanted to create a solution to the unregulated mobile usage problem by empowering them to use their phones responsibly." said Jagrit, a fellow from the first cohort of Plaksha Tech Leaders Fellows from Plaksha University and University of California Berkeley.

Apprison’s impact is seen on aspects beyond improving one’s digital well-being. Students and young working professionals have seen a boost in their performance as well. For businesses, Apprison provides a non-regulatory way of reducing the loss of productivity in offices. It also provides analytics on the most distracting apps, peak mobile usage hours etc. This creates an environment that rewards choices to avoid distractions caused by apps.

Happea: The happiness solution

Happea, an app whose name is an amalgamation of happiness and peace, works by creating a customised Happiness Index that gives its users deeply personal insights into what makes them happy, the steps they can take to keep themselves in such a state, and how they can help others achieve the same goal.

Jayesh, who is a gold medalist from IIM, said, "The only global index that exists right now is the UN Global Happiness Index, where India generally ranks quite low. This standard does practically nothing for the layperson, which is ironic, because a nation's happiness is nothing but the sum of its citizens' happiness. With Happea's scientific diagnostic tests, we aim to provide the common user with a keyhole to take a peek into her own happiness and understand it better."

Sources of happiness vary from person to person due to their varied age groups, personalities, tastes, outlooks to life and others factors. Some might find happiness in acquiring physical and sensory pleasures. Other might prefer intellectual and spiritual pursuits, all of which can be uncovered by Happea’s diagnostics. Happea also provides its users with self-paced activities and tasks to allow them to spend time with themselves and make a conscious effort to strive towards their own happiness. The ultimate objective of Happea is to start a ‘Happiness Movement’, where each and every individual takes up the mantle of creating awareness and spreading happiness and peace by beginning with themselves.

Mentored by eminent psychologist and startup mentor Dr. Jawahar Surisetti, the brothers are looking to make an impact on the global well-being ecosystem.

"While on one hand, Apprison ensures that there is no erosion in people's digital well-being. On the other, Happea enables people to become happier and more fulfilled in their lives. Health and well-being is a $10 billion global industry and this combination has the potential to make a big dent in this market," Dr. Jawahar said.

Currently, NineLives is bootstrapped and is on track to adding 5000+ unique users monthly. The aim is to positively impact a 100 million lives by 2025.

Apprison: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codenicely.apprison.app.prison

Happea: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smilebots.hmt