Joon's Behavior Improvement Tools for Kids with Mental and Behavioral Disorder

Mental health is a vital aspect of one’s overall health and well-being, including children. A child’s mental health plays a major role in how they think, feel, and act, but many children suffer mental disorders that significantly change how they behave, learn, and handle their emotions. According to the CDC, ADHD and anxiety are among the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders in children aged 3 to 17 years around 2016-201.

ODD and autism are a few existing disorders experienced by children as well. It’s sad to say, however, that the US is suffering a massive shortage of child psychologists and therapists while pediatric behavior disorder diagnoses keep rising. Long delays in crucial treatment keep occurring as families need to wait 6-12 months for access to specialists.

Joon, a startup founded by Kevin Bunarjo, Brad Brenner, and Isaac Eaves, created a gamified behavior improvement app aimed at motivating children with mental and behavioral disorders to stay on top of daily routines and tasks.

Child Psychiatry Access Programs

According to a study published in 2019, the number of child psychiatrists has increased in the last 10 years, but it is still not enough to meet demand. Several states are very much aware of this national workforce shortage, and some are addressing the issue by creating and implementing Child Psychiatry Access Programs (CPAPs).

CPAPs are services aimed to assist primary care pediatricians in providing mental health care. Most, if not all, of these services provide pediatricians accompanied by child psychiatrists with free, same-day telephone consultations to discuss diagnoses and care coordination.

Services also include face-to-face evaluations, telemedicine, and provider education. When CPAPs are run effectively, children can receive proper and timely mental health treatment.

Unfortunately, these programs depend on grants, short-term contracts, and yearly budgetary decisions by state organizations, which creates uncertainty in their continuation. Many programs have faced discontinuation due to grants not being renewed, contracts being pulled, and zero budgets set aside for them.

Joon offers a more permanent solution with its gamified digital app, filled with parent, teacher, and therapist monitoring tools to ensure effectiveness.

Gamified Routine

Joon is essentially an educational video game, free to use, with a few premium features available through subscription, designed for kids aged 6 to 12. Joon assigns a small list of daily recommended tasks and chores named Quests based on focus areas, though parents are also able to be the ones creating tasks.

A list of daily tasks to complete may sound grueling, thus frustrating for children with difficulty in focusing and maintaining their attention. Joon aims to make tasks and routines less intimidating with gamified features and toolkits, routine planners, and monitoring dashboards available for teachers, therapists, and parents to monitor a child’s performance.

Kids can choose a virtual pet called a Doter that they can feed, wash, grow, and explore Joon with. Completing assigned tasks enables children to take care of their pet and level it up. Joon provides weekly recommendations based on a child’s performance to help them build habits and pick up life skills.

The therapist-approved app allows parents and clinicians to monitor a child’s progress on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule, and Joon can be set to send timely reminders to keep a child on track. According to the team behind Joon, the app’s gamified features have led to 90% of kids completing all their assigned tasks.

Video games have recently become quite significant in advancing digital therapeutics. Aware that games are increasingly helping kids and adults manage ADHD and anxiety, the team behind Joon believes that gamification can very much improve children’s behaviors and positively impact families.

Joon launched its gamified app, which is available on iOS, Android, Amazon Fire Tablets, and Chromebooks, in 2022 and has since reached over 500,000 users and 18,000 paying subscribers. The team plans on being the first-line digital treatment for pediatric behavior disorders over the next 10 years.

Joon raised $6.4M in its most recent funding round led by MaC Venture Capital and Dune Ventures. Blue Lion Global and North South Ventures participated in the round as well.

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