Rewiring The Next Generation - HIMSS26 Europe Insights with Marc Ritter

Hello, dear listeners, welcome back to Narratives of Purpose, the podcast amplifying social impact. With me, Claire Murigande. I bring you conversations with the global change makers who are contributing to make a positive impact in society with a special focus on healthcare innovation.

This is episode number four of our HIMSS Europe 2026 special series. After last year's event in Paris, I am back at the HIMSS, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society European Conferen, this time in Copenhagen, gathering unique insights from some of the conference speakers.

My guest today is Marc Ritter, neuroscientist, CEO and co founder of AWE Digital Wellness, which is the first online mental health platform specifically aimed at addressing Internet and phone addiction in youth, teenagers and young adults. Marc and I talk about building a safer tech ecosystem for kids.

He unpacks the science behind smartphone addiction, digital burnout, and the mental health crisis unfolding in the next generation. Enjoy this conversation, share the episode with someone in your network and remember that you can leave a comment on the Narratives of Purpose website using this short link bit.ly/narrativesofpurpose, then select the Review page.

Hi, good afternoon, Marc.

Hello, Claire.

Thank you for joining me today.

Thank you for having me.

We're here at HIMSS in Copenhagen and we'll be sitting together on a panel tomorrow morning.

Exciting.

Super exciting. Now, before we talk about that, I'd like you to introduce yourself. Tell us about your background and what actually led you to found. You're the founder, right, of AWE, A-W-E Digital Wellness.

AWE Wellness, A-W-E Wellness, CEO and co-founder.

So I grew up with technology in my house. So my parents had a laptop that they got when I was 13 and I'd go on the Internet and I got an ipod touch when I was 14. I would use it every night before I went to bed watching YouTube videos. And this was before the smartphone actually came out, right? The advent of like first iPhone was developed I think 2006, 2007. That's when it came onto the market. But I didn't get a smartphone until I was 20. But I still had, these devices that were present in my house. So I, at an early age I was just going on YouTube and, and spending so much time.

And over the years I thought this was just a phase that would stop, but I kept using my phone, I kept using the Internet and spending hours per day on it, right. And it got to the point where I started getting concerned and viewing this as an actual addiction. Right? And this led me to go do a master's to neuroscience where I studied Internet gaming disorders and compared it to cocaine use disorder, alcohol use disorder.

Because my goal was really to understand is this an addiction that we're dealing with? Because the ICD11 and the DSM5. Well, DSM5 actually includes gambling use disorder as a classified addiction.

So what classifications are Those?

So the DSM 5, which is a diagnostic statistical manual on psychiatric disorder which is released once every couple of years, is a manual on mental health disorders and basically what the psychiatric community recognizes as a mental health disorder.

Alcohol, cocaine use, substance, it's more classified under the umbrella of substance use now however, gambling use disorder is included in the DSM 5 as well as a recognized behavioral addiction. However, social media addiction, Internet addiction are not right. But I still had this lived experience that I had been dealing with and I knew a lot of other people my age were dealing with it as well.

And so my goal with this meta analysis that I did was to establish whether there are neurobiological correlates. I used resting state data and I found that Internet gaming disorder has a lot of the same mechanisms that resemble an addiction similar to substance use disorders under fMRI studies. And I presented this research at a few different conferences and that's where I met my co founder and we ended up founding AWE Digital Wellness.

And out of curiosity, were you still quote unquote addicted to your iPhone while you were doing your research?

Yeah, yeah, I still am right now. I, I don't, I'm very open about it because I don't want to seem hypocritical and be like, oh, I'm the guy who overcame Internet.

I think it's a very real issue that many adults are dealing with. And you know, we spoke a little bit before about ADHD and comorbidity with something like an Internet addiction. There is a gray line between what is actually an addiction, what is, you know, adhd, depression, anxiety, coping mechanisms that manifest as these behaviors that we're talking about. But very much so. I know personally if I spend too much time alone at home, I will become prone to going online and just scrolling YouTube and spending too much time there. And I've accepted that and I've decided that I just need to change my environment to overcome that.

And so tell us about AWE wellness.

Yes.

What is it exactly?

So exactly with what I just stated, you know, changing your environment actually changes your behavior. Our platform was built on the foundation of a lot of evidence based psychotherapeutic methods similar to ACT, CBT. So CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. We've built a few different AI models that are built on thousands of hours of therapeutic transcripts. And we are very much, we're very careful not to call these models AI therapists.

I don't think AI can ever replace a human being and something that we'll definitely get into tomorrow. But we very much understand the risk that technology, smartphones, AI pose to children and teenagers. We have built a safer ecosystem for kids to thrive and to have safeguards so that they're not overusing technology and becoming more addicted to it.

And the objective is to really help kids and teenagers or also adults.

I mean this applies to adults as well. I think the target demographic that we're focused on is kids and teenagers. One because the parents are extremely concerned about this and we full transparency, we are a for profit business and at the end of the day kids might have a huge problem, but they don't have the money perhaps to pay for it. Parents do have the money to pay for it and they're very concerned about their children. And on top of that, this is the, as we said before, the future generation. This is the next generation. We are really investing in the next generation.

It seems like with a lot of what has been going on at HIMSS, you know, there's a lot of fascination, excitement around AI without understanding the consequences for this next generation, which is what we are really preparing for.

You told me before when were discussing about this new device that you developed, the Smarter Phone.

The Smarter Phone. I know it's a terrible name, but we did a partnership with Samsung. So Samsung has partnered with us to develop the hardware for the phone and It's a Samsung A56 smartphone. It's not a sexy phone. It's really meant to be the first phone that a kid gets, a transitionary phone. Essentially training kids to have a healthier relationship with technology. The way it really works is pretty much operant conditioning. So let's say that a kid wants to go on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, right? Now with a normal smartphone, there's unmitigated access to the Internet. They can go on these platforms, websites, apps, whenever they want with no consequence. There's no penalty, it's just unlimited reward, unlimited dopamine.

The operating system that we've developed for the Smarter Phone rewards kids for good behavior. So for example, the phone will prompt a challenge and say, okay, lay your phone on a flat surface for 30 minutes and go for a walk, go for a gym. Now the phone can't actually track whether you're going for a walk or if you're going to the gym or speaking friends. But it does detect movement.

Okay, that's how you can control.

Yes, essentially. Yeah. So the phone knows that you haven't interacted with it for 30 minutes, right. Or an hour. You can adjust this and once you do that, you'll be rewarded with 10 minutes, 15 minutes of screen time. So essentially you want to reward kids for good behavior. Right. And punish them for bad behavior. This is essentially what parents do. Anyways,

I was going to say this is parenting, right?

It's not rocket science here. We're just putting it into a smartphone. Right. For kids. On top of that, we have our AI tools that are embedded in the phones themselves. And kids nowadays already using AI, we've accepted that it's part of the lives. We want to build an AI that has safeguarding tools embedded in it so that if they express something like suicidal ideation, self harm to others, that the system will flag that and notify somebody in the back and a caretaker, a parent, a teacher, a psychiatrist, psychologist, so that they can intervene in that moment.

Because right now, and this is something that I'll be talking about a little bit during our discussion tomorrow, if somebody expresses some of these concerns, right? Self harm, suicidal ideation, harm towards others, there's no one who's really notified. It's an isolated incident. And that is a person who's more vulnerable than ever in that moment and they need help in that moment. And we believe, we 100% believe in privacy, but 100% privacy with unmitigated use of AI with children does have consequences that we've seen.

So it's like an internal supervisor, sort of.

Correct? Yeah. And it's again, we make sure that specific keywords, phrases will flag the system. When I say flag, the system will notify a designated user, like a parent, that hey, your child has been expressing these concerning views. Perhaps this is the right time for you to intervene. This is the time for you to step in and perhaps help them in some sort of way.

When were preparing the panel like a few weeks ago, you also talked about burnout, like digital burnout.

Oh yeah.

It was super interesting to hear that. Because I know for one that when I set up like a new smartphone, I was telling that to you before, I would take the time to go into the settings and make sure that, you know, I don't have the automatic notification with the sound with the iPhone icon and everything. And only when I need it. And when I take the time, I will look at my emails or I go on LinkedIn or whatever. I don't want to be constantly, you know, overwhelmed.

Yeah.

So, what is digital burnout, actually?

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned overwhelm, digital overwhelm, burnout. Essentially we have these technologies that are inundating us with information. Notifications, messages, emails every which way. And it's very hard for the mammalian brain, the primitive brain, to dissociate signal from noise. We're getting tons of messages bombarded us 24/7. Because attention is the new gold. It's the most important commodity on the market, right?

People are fighting for your attention constantly. Not just people, algorithms, because they can monetize that attention. So, burnout is essentially the fragmentation of your attention being distributed so many different ways and being pulled by other actors, other sources. So much so that you feel exhausted and you can't even pay attention yourself on anything.

And this has a lot of negative health consequences for people who do primarily work online in front of computer or run online businesses. I have a few friends who run online businesses who are also burned out right now. They just can't do it anymore, right? Because we're using constantly evolving technology, but the hardware that we, the biological hardware that we're working with is still very much primitive.

Yeah. It was not designed basically to deal with that.

Not at all. Yeah. It's similar to what I was saying before that the brain evolved as an information scavenging organ. Right. The same way that our hunter gatherer ancestors scavenged for food in a food scarce savannah. Right. Our brain is still biologically hardwired to scavenge for information in what it deems an information scarce environment. But we're not living in an information scarce environment.

No, quite the opposite.

It's quite the opposite. And so the consequence that you see of that is burnout. It is overwhelm. It is people having a much more negative outlook on technology than ever before.

I know it's difficult to like predict what might come out of it, especially for the younger generation. But what do you think? Because also from a neuroscientific background, what do they think could be the consequences of having a whole generation really? So, I mean, already pre burned out digitally before they become adults?

Yeah. Well, I think like you said, it's really hard to predict exactly what sort of effect AI or technology is going to have on kids in the future. What we can look at is data from the past 10, 15 years. Jonathan Haidt has been really at the forefront of a lot of this research that has been done specifically on the outcomes health Outcomes for kids.

Demographic groups like teenage girls in the United States, where he's demonstrated that the levels of anxiety have gone up threefold. Self reported measures of anxiety in teenage girls has gone up threefold over the last 10 years. Mentions of suicidal ideation in online chat forums has gone up tremendously. The amount of time that people check their phone on average per day is 300 times per day.

300 Times?

300 Times per day? Yeah, 300 times per day. I've done a few workshops before where I ask people, how many times do you think you check your phone? And most of the answers I get are like, oh, 50 maybe maximum 60. People are shocked like you were. And when they find out it's 300 times a day that you actually check your phone.

And I think what that really means is that people are spending a lot more time on their phone than they actually realize and they're losing a lot more time that could be spent on more productive, healthier things. Relationship building, exercise, going outside, meeting with their family, right? But these are some of the second order effects that we're seeing from technology use, especially in teenagers.

And to the point of, you know, regulation and having guardrails. You were telling me before that ChatGPT, just to name the one which is most known, there's been like a competition to be on the market, so they didn't work so much in the background to ensure enough guardrails. But so what is needed at this point? As you were saying before, it's evolving so quickly. What can we do at this point or what do we need to do in the near future to ensure that at least we can put in some sort of guardrails and support regulation at a national, regional level.

Absolutely, yeah. There's three main players. So we have Anthropic, which is famously known for Claude, then Google, Gemini, OpenAI has ChatGPT. And so you're right, they are all competing with each other and they have business objectives, right, which is user engagement, daily active users, number of newly acquired users on a monthly basis. So they are very much pressed perhaps by their stakeholders, by their investors to get these technologies to the market. Right. GPT4 was rushed to the market and this was at the time where the famous case going on against OpenAI right now is rain versus AI, which is the case of Adam Rainbow. His parents are suing OpenAI in claiming that the AI encouraged him actually to take his life. Right. Somebody who had preexisting depression and delusions about life.

And the AI came in and confirmed a lot of These delusions to him. But to your question, which is like, what can we really do? Is building these safeguards in place so that caretakers are notified the moment that somebody expresses something that could indicate long term harm either to themselves or to other people? I really do believe that there's so much pressure on these companies, not just because of the liability and the legal cases against them, but yet something like the Zuckerberg trial that was in New Mexico, that happened recently. He was sued for 250 million, which is really a drop in the pond for somebody who was the CEO of Meta. But more so, the big implication here is that it opens the floodgate for future legal against Meta.

For anyone listening who doesn't know, essentially what that trial determined was that Meta was liable for harm done to children because they had engineered their platforms to be as addictive as possible and without taking into account the effects that this could have on children. Right. So I think these platforms are seeing the consequences. Once they see the consequences, then they change the technology. What we would like to see, though, is preventative measures to change the technology before it gets to the point where somebody takes their own life or where you have a generation of kids whose attention has been fragmented, cognition levels are much lower. It's all this stuff.

It makes me think about the pharmaceutical industry. You have to go through all these clinical phases and then there is, you know, strict regulation.

That's a great comparison.

And so I'm wondering, because digital tools are also used in mental health care.

Yeah.

Right. So how do you see this? Because digital health at this point is not as regulated as classical health or, you know, drug development.

Yeah.

So do you see there sort of similar risks?

For sure, yeah. And I love that you brought up the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps there was a point where the pharmaceutical industry was sort of the wild west without regulations, and then they ran into the consequences for their actions and then they were forced to change the landscape. And. And the fact of the matter is, clearly, like a lot of this technology is so new, AI has really only been around for like three years now. And we will perhaps see a lot of regulation similar to the cryptocurrency industry. Totally unregulated. Right. And a lot of people taking advantage of that. A lot of fraudsters, right? Stealing money.

Now, the cryptocurrency industry is subject to a lot of regulations and it's what is needed right now in that industry, just as it was needed in the pharmaceutical industry and just as it will be needed here with AI. Right. So we are really at the Forefront. And I think it's inevitable that we're going to be seeing regulations in the future. If we see more and more cases like Solberg versus OpenAI or Rain versus OpenAI. One in four people are using OpenAI for…

One in four…

Yeah, yeah, one in four.

…that's tremendous.

Yeah. For clinical purposes. So it's inevitable. I really do believe it's inevitable that we're going to see this. And it's unfortunate that the cost of that might be some people taking their own lives or harming others or depression, anxiety, all these things on the rise.

So what is your outlook? I mean, we're here at a conference which is, you know, health tech and we're talking about innovations and how AI and technology can help physicians, healthcare providers and ultimately patients, right? And give us back time together as humans, if I can put in simple words. So what is your outlook?

Because you also working towards that through technology. So what do you see in the future?

I think people are aware of the consequences that technology has on mental health. As I said to you before though, it still doesn't convince the investors, unfortunately, the people working at the VCs or the CEOs of these companies, there's no real business use case for them to actually care about protecting kids or protecting young adults who are harmed by technology. And perhaps we, like I said before, maybe we will need some consequences, unfortunately, for them to actually take it seriously, for regulators to step in.

The general sentiment in younger people in young generations is not very optimistic about their futures because they realize there's a lot of fear and fear of being outsourced completely, no longer being needed in the workplace, right? Instead of feeling a lot of the people telling them, oh, AI is going to liberate you, they don't feel that way. They feel very hopeless about the future.

That's not a good sign for the next generation.

No, it's not a good sign. Not at all. So I think the awareness is a good step. But I would love to see people put their money where their mouth is, right? And that means investors actually taking action here.

Final question. What would you like the audience to take away from tomorrow's session?

What I would like them to take away? Absolutely is that regulation certainly can help, right? But we have seen cases where regulatory intervention is not the ultimate solution. The country that we're in right now, Denmark passed a law banning social media for kids under 16. Australia did the same thing. France, Spain, these countries are stepping in. Does that stop kids from using social media or AI? No, it doesn't. I mean, kids are very clever. They'll find ways to get around that. They'll use VPNs, they'll use fake accounts, they'll do whatever they can to get to the source. And similar to somebody who's actually addicted, right?

I was gonna say, yeah.

If you take a beer or vodka away from an alcoholic, they will be very clever in finding alcohol, right? So we have to address the underlying root of the problem, which is these neglected needs like loneliness or the feeling of not being significant, a sense of uncertainty about the future and the coping mechanisms being technology, addiction. Those are the really the symptoms that manifest as a result of these neglected needs.

So, long story short, AI has a ton of really exciting applications for business in the future. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathroom. We have to take into account what sort of consequences this has on the younger generation and listen to their voice because that voice is the one that ultimately matters for the long term perspectives, that is the future generation. And we have to invest in them.

And that's a good point. Listen to their voice, right? It reminds me very much, you know, as a founder, when you're creating a product, you need to listen to your consumer.

What the consumer says. Yeah, exactly

What they need. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Claire.

It's great having you.

One thing Marc didn't mention in our conversation is that AWE Digital Wellness partners with companies with schools, healthcare systems and families to build healthier habits. Learn more about the organization on their website at awewellness.org. The link is in the Show Notes.

Thanks a lot for tuning in today. Join me again next week for a new episode featuring Valentine Kamau, founder and host of the AI HealthBeat Africa podcast. Until then, take care of yourselves, stay well and stay inspired.