Human Experience Dynamics (HED)

Redefining human experience measurement

A platform to integrate physiological, behavioural and subjective data using Temporal Experience Tracing™, a drawing method to capture human experience.

Human Experience Dynamics (HED), a new spinout of the University of Cambridge, has created a platform that redefines how we measure the subjective aspects of human experiences and how we use those measurements alongside clinical, cognitive, physiological and brain imaging data. The tools and methods HED have developed capture richer, more sensitive, precise, and continuous insights for clinical trials, biomedicine, and wellbeing tracking. HED uses AI-powered and evidence-based analytical tools to create reports for clinical researchers, improving the clinical, scientific and economic efficiency the trials.

Technology overview

Dr Barbara Jachs and Dr Tristan Bekinschtein have developed Temporal Experience Tracing™ (TET) to address a critical gap in healthcare and clinical trials: the lack of reliable, time-continuous data on patients’ first-person experiences and how these integrate with clinical and physiological measures. Traditional methods of capturing subjective patient data, such as questionnaires and scales, are often too simplistic, offering only snapshots that fail to capture the richness of patients’ day-to-day fluctuations in symptoms like pain, fatigue, and emotional well-being. The data from existing methods lacks depth, fails to provide actionable insights, and is unable to match the granularity in physiological data Clinical Trials are already collecting.

TET solves this by allowing patients to retrospectively map their experiences across multiple dimensions throughout the day, generating time-series data that is scientifically robust and aligns with physiological metrics like heart rate or biomarkers. This holistic view provides a more accurate picture of how patients respond to treatments, enabling clinicians and researchers to better understand treatment efficacy and optimise care.

A key aspect of TET is its patient-centric design. The system tracks both generic experience dimensions, allowing comparisons across different patient cohorts, and condition-specific dimensions that are co-designed with patients. This ensures that the experiences and symptoms that matter most to the individual are being monitored. This collaborative approach allows researchers to track what truly affects patient quality of life, ensuring that treatments and interventions are assessed on metrics that resonate with those living through them and become rich and sensitive outcomes for the research trials.

The real-world impact of TET is profound: it empowers healthcare providers to personalise treatments, improving outcomes for patients in areas such as chronic illness management, palliative care, and mental health. By integrating subjective experience data with clinical measures, we can better understand the complexities of human health.

Opportunity

We are actively engaging with organisations in the clinical trial sector to further apply TET as a new, dynamic method of data capture. We are especially interested in developing partnerships with pharmaceutical, health and wellness, and medical device companies.

Data has already been collected across several research trials, including studies on Stress and Anxiety in Autism, Chronic Pain, Meditation Practices, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Breathwork-induced psychedelic experiences.

Our mission is to redefine how the subjective aspects of human experience are measured during these trials, offering richer, more sensitive, precise, and continuous insights that can lead to groundbreaking advancements in healthcare.

Founders

Dr Barbara Jachs, Co-founder

Dr Barbara Jachs has worked as Lead Data Scientist and Data Consultant in tech startups and has extensive experience in the full life cycle of Data and AI projects, from inception to deployment.

She holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, where she was based at the Consciousness and Cognition Lab. Barbara’s research focused on the relationship between the structures of subjective experience and the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’.

Barbara has worked with daily meditation practitioners, using portable EEG devices and continuous experience reports to study measurable states of consciousness. While conducting this research, Barbara iterated on methods for collection continuous first-person experience data from her participants, which resulted in the development of TET.

Her PhD research was supported by an ESRC DTP studentship and the Mind and Life Europe Varela Award. Barbara has a strong foundation in statistical analysis and experimental design, with a profound interest in mental health.

Dr Tristan Bekinschtein, Co-founder

Dr Tristan Bekinschtein is a distinguished biologist with a Master in Neurophysiology and a PhD in Neuroscience from Buenos Aires University. He has held prestigious positions as an EU Marie Curie Fellow, a senior researcher at the MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, and a Fyssen fellow at ICM in Paris. He is also a Wellcome Trust Fellow and a Turing Fellow.

In 2011, Tristan founded the Consciousness and Cognition Lab at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, where he currently serves as a Principal Investigator and Lecturer. His multidisciplinary lab, which includes experts from Neuroscience, Psychology, Statistics, Computing, Engineering, and Philosophy, focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The lab’s research delves into the complexity of thought, the fragmentation of cognition during sleep or sedation, the differences between conscious states, and the interaction between attention and consciousness in both health and disease.

His work aims to bridge the interface between behavioural and brain data with health and wellbeing, using brain and cognition mechanisms to explore these interactions. In recent years, he has concentrated on describing behaviourally and brainwise, various states of consciousness such as awake, sleep, sedation, and vegetative states; contents of consciousness, such as dreaming, meditative states, psychedelics, and patient experiences.

References

Niedernhuber, M., et al. (2024). Attention and Interoception Alter Perceptual and Neural Pain Signatures-A Case Study.

Lewis-Healey, E., et al. (2024). Breathwork-induced psychedelic experiences modulate neural dynamics.

Gernert, C.C., et al. (2024). Stress in autism (STREAM): A study protocol.

Jachs, B., et al. (2022). Drawing the experience dynamics of meditation.

Jachs, B. (2022). The Neurophenomenology of Meditative States.

Image credit: Unsplash

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