After Scoring $17M, Mightier Seeks to Improve Youth Emotional Health through Its Gaming Solutions

Over time, various studies and academic literature have asserted that video games – long thought by many to contribute to adverse behaviors – can have positive emotional effects on users.

A believer in the positive power of the video game experience, Boston-based Mightier is a gaming platform designed to improve a variety of behaviors among young people.

“Games are great, because games are a microcosm of life,” Jason Kahn, the founder and chief science officer of Mightier, told Behavioral Health Business. “Games naturally frustrate you. Games are naturally challenging and kids are hyper-motivated to play games.”

Founded in 2016, Mightier was developed by clinicians including Kahn who were working at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

The Mightier platform consists of games that are targeted for children ages 6-12 who deal with various conditions related to behavioral outbursts like tantrums and anger. Mightier’s games – which are available through Google, Apple and Amazon – are also tailored to young users with diagnoses including ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder and autism spectrum disorder.

Mightier has over 25 games which include titles like “Race The Sun,” the subway system-building game “Mini Metro” and the food preparation challenge “Hibachi Hero.” The platform also has games inspired by such sports as air hockey, soccer and billiards.

Children who play games on Mightier wear a device that monitors their heart rate. If the device detects that a child’s heart rate is going up, the game is made more difficult to play, which acts as a motivating factor for its users to become calmer in order to accomplish specific tasks.

“When you get frustrated, when things get challenging, your life does not get easier,” Kahn said. “We wanted to echo that experience within a game.”

The birth, rise and future of Mightier

All of Mightier’s games are labelled by a ratings system similar to that of mainstream video games, with some titles having multiple ratings that designate them as being anything from novice- and expert-approved to having sensory stimulation or cartoon violence present.

Families can sign up for a Mightier membership at $40 per month, $204 for six months or $334 annually.

“If your child is having a hard time sitting still, or if your child is acting out or is frustrated easily, these are symptoms that you can easily track and see,” said Kahn in describing how Mighter’s games can track users’ moods. “Those externalizing symptoms are really where Mightier shines.”

For the genesis of what would become Mightier, Kahn and his colleagues at Boston Children’s and Harvard conducted studies over several years with games designed to regulate children’s emotional reactions. The group found the games helped to reduce stress levels and improve behaviors, which subsequently informed the creation of Mightier.

“That was really the birthpoint of the commercial entity of Mightier,” said Kahn. “We knew within the walls of the hospital, we would only be able to reach a few hundred kids a year.”

Throughout its history, Mightier has reached over 50,000 families. The company says that its games have built off its early research findings at Boston Children’s and Harvard, with the platform helping to reduce parental stress by almost 20%, oppositional behavior by 40% and child outbursts by over 60%. Overall, Mightier claims that 87% of families that use the platform see a positive change in their child’s behavior in 90 days.

Mightier announced last December that it raised $17 million in a Series B funding round led by DigiTx Partners, which came months after it inked a partnership with Magellan Health to provide members with services as a part of a pilot program. To date, the company has raised over $29.3 million, according to fundraising tracking site Crunchbase.

Mightier plans to use its latest funding to grow its team and scale its services. The company hopes at some point to expand its services directly into school systems and is eyeing the possibility of someday dipping a toe into the domestic video game market – estimated to be worth nearly $86 billion – by partnering with mainstream developers on products.

Sony, which manufactures the PlayStation video game system, invested in Mightier’s Series B round through its venture capital fund.

“We want to exist in kids’ worlds,” said Kahn, who is also currently an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a scientist at Boston Children’s. “That means going to the places they are, that also means being in the games that they already love”

Kahn feels that the Mightier platform has become an especially useful tool for children as they struggle nationwide with adverse behavioral experiences related to factors such as the pandemic.

He particularly believes that the platform can currently help children regulate their emotional behaviors on an everyday basis, as they may not have access to in-person services from clinicians and at schools that they had prior to Covid.

“What we need to do is we need to find digital tools like Mightier and put them in the house, because that’s where these kids are,” Kahn said.