Mr Salmon, a former star for the Essendon and Hawthorn football clubs, has created a smartphone app that analyses mood against lifestyle and environmental data. 

He says moodflx identifies the triggers and trends that positively impact an individual’s mood, which can lead to boosts in employee engagement and productivity. 

“My wife is one of the world’s leaders in children’s physical activity and health, and this started as a personal project of ours,” he said. 

“As a father and as someone who spent 20 years in a locker room, you notice how mood impacts an individual’s decisions. I set about developing this technology that could be integrated in a classroom setting, and it was a little box that enabled students to input how they were feeling at any time of the day.”

Moodflx’s trials in primary schools were successful, and Mr. Salmon says the technology is now ready for the workplace. The company recently completed a seed investment round, and is in pre-launch with an umber of brands including health and wellbeing insurer AIA Australia. 

“We have an opportunity for this technology to create a new global index on mood, from businesses, state to state and country to country,” Mr Salmon said. 

“There is a potential now to have a real-time emotional pulse on the world today, and that is coming. It’s going to be insightful data and I think it’s going to have a significant impact on the living day excperience on consumers and in workplaces.”

Dr. Natalie Lander, a Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University and moodflx’s reserach and implementation lead said that the app picks up on trends or patterns in the emotional engagement of the workforce, providing targeted insights to influence decisions and resources. 

She said that at an individual level, moodflx captures real-time and longitudinal profiles of mood that result in confidential and personalised insights, and permission is sought from individuals to access any contextual data on their phone. 

The start-up’s app is compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards and has received compliance to Third-Party Security Assurance (TPSA) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), she said.

“moodflx uses the well-known circumplex model of affect to produce a scientifically vaidated measure of the mood,” she said. 

“The app speaks to what is known as ‘psyhchological flexibility’, the usperpower of mental health and wellbeing. Defined as the ability to ‘make contact with experience in the present moment fully and without defence’. 

“It’s about our ability to accept all mood states, not just positive, and be more deeply aware of the full range of emotions we experience.”

Mr Salmon said that until now, mood has been ‘underestimated’ in workplaces and now companies have this data at their fingertips in real time. 

“Moodflx provides immediate feedback mreducing management response time from months to days and provides the business case to focus change initiatives that build employee trust and engagement.”

DAVID SWAN, TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
The Australian