Egone Martín Godoy is from Arrecife and when she was ten years old, she decided she would dedicate herself to science to help her mother, who had just been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
“I have always been a super curious girl, I love science and learning. When my mother was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, she started to be super dependent on my father and me. Since then, I started to investigate health to find a cure for her disease and all diseases,” shares Martín.
"When it was time to choose a career, a guitar classmate (music is another of Egone's passions and part of her project), told me that the biotechnology degree existed and I liked it very much.”
Egone was always a very studious person, so she managed to get into the degree in Granada, where a cut-off grade of 13.1 out of 15 was required. Later, she would complement her studies with an online master's degree in artificial intelligence applied to health, which she took from Lanzarote.
As her master's final project, she designed the mobile application EGOverse, “a diary in which you can record how you feel every day in a private and anonymous space to keep your own emotional tracking.”
An AI of emotions for the Spanish-speaking world
Egone's original project is to create an artificial intelligence model that, through voice, identifies how people are emotionally, but she encountered the limitation that there were no databases in Spanish that allowed this work, so she trained the model with an English database.
“It was impossible for me to extrapolate it to Spanish, because although the model identifies mostly whether the person speaks higher, lower, faster, slower, and other special acoustic characteristics, the language difference interfered much more than I thought,” she explains.
So she decided to study another master's degree, in this case, in business development, and came into contact with the Lanzarote-based company Canarytek, where she works with an innovation scholarship, “which has provided me with all the technological infrastructure, servers, and knowledge to develop the application.”
This is how the EGOverse application was born, which, in addition to being an emotional diary, serves as a database for developing the aforementioned artificial intelligence model. The application is free, and users can use it whether they decide to share their data or not. Shared data is end-to-end encrypted.
“There is the option of a temporary chat in which perhaps you allow your audios to train the model, but if there is a conversation that you do not want to be recorded, you can deactivate the chat. You can always revoke the permissions you have given,” adds the entrepreneur from Arrecife.
The impact of emotions on diseases
“It is already scientifically proven that a large part of diseases, especially chronic ones, have a quite high emotional component. Furthermore, Spain is one of the leaders in the European Union in antidepressant consumption, and mental health is already the third leading cause of death among young people,” explains Martín.
“Many people track their sleep, their sports activity, their heart rate, but very few people have emotional tracking.”
That is the objective of EGOverse: “an emotional diary in which you express yourself freely without anyone judging you, you have a companion who helps you. It will never replace a health professional, but it asks you questions that make you inquire, it helps you express yourself and let go. Furthermore, the application gives you a report every two weeks in which you see the progress of your mental health,” shares the biotechnologist from Lanzarote.
Once the database in Spanish is completed, for which she requires about 5,000 audios, the researcher plans to give it a therapeutic application.
“I want to work with music, with sound frequencies depending on how one is to give it feedback that helps it to regulate emotionally. A solution that does not generate a chemical reaction like a medication, nor does it generate side effects or dependence.”
The application is still free and, moreover, for loyal users, the technologist from Lanzarote plans to offer discounts on the training courses she offers through the platform Skool. They can also get to know the expert in technology and health through her social media. In the future, Martín plans to create a premium subscription for the mobile application with additional functionalities.
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