Sarah Hill, chief storyteller, and CEO of Healium (tryhealium.com) provides a thoughtful overview of her exciting industry that is helping people to get in touch with their feelings and emotions and influence them in a positive way through the use of technology. Hill is the CEO of StoryUP XR, the visionary company behind Healium. She is a former television journalist for the NBC, ABC, & CBS affiliates in Missouri and a savvy media technologist with over 25 years experience building successful platforms. Hill has a strong journalistic background and many years experience as an interactive reporter often focused on the world's negativity and trauma, and as such she is a national Edward R. Murrow, NAB Service to America, and twelve-time mid-America Emmy award-winning storyteller. She began working directly with augmented reality filters during her live TV newscasts in 2011 focusing on a variety of XR inputs such as heart rate variability and respiration trackers. 

Hill's journalistic passion has taken her all over the world as she has delivered powerful stories of the human spirit originating in the Amazon, Congo, Zambia, UAE, Guatemala, and China. She holds a bachelor of journalism from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Hill's company, Healium, is the first augmented and virtual reality (AR & VR) channel that is powered by biometrics. Hill details the Healium headband and how it measures gamma asymmetry that is associated with our feelings, such as love, joy, appreciation, openness, etc. Healium's platform allows users to engage and take a more active role in their personal well being, to become more self-aware of the power of their feelings. 

The Healium experience is delivered through wearables including a low profile brain-computer interface (BCI). As stress is now considered to be an actual epidemic, Hill expresses the urgency to develop methods to alleviate stress and connect with our emotional state. Hill states that their platform helps users achieve a heightened sense of self-awareness, via biometrics, as the data helps to make users aware of the power of their emotions. She discusses neuromeditation and Dr. Jeff Tarrant's fascinating work as his team uses state-of-the-art biofeedback technologies to monitor the brain and body in order to train the nervous system to return to a more optimal state. 

Hill discusses some of the published studies that concluded Healium's platform demonstrated a reduction in anxiety for various users. She recounts stories of individual users who have shared their experiences learning about and trying Healium for the first time. And she details some of their comments regarding the experience, their recalled memories, feelings of altered states or relaxation and others while using the platform.

The Healium low-profile headband known as a brain-computer interface senses electrical activity in the brain and a virtual reality headset then immerses the user into the experience. Additionally, the Healium augmented reality experiences are designed to work without goggles as well, with a simple smartphone. Hill shares her thoughts on the overall experience that users receive and how her team is extremely concerned that every user's experience is a positive one.