You are defined in life by the choices you make. Some are made for you, and some you make yourself.

The intricate realm of the philosophy of choice stipulates that every decision is a crossroad between destiny and a dessert menu. Every decision we make is governed by various options and consequences that arise from what we select. This philosophical inquiry touches upon numerous branches of thought from ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and existentialism as we grapple with questions of free will, determinism, responsibility and the nature of reality.

It is estimated that the average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day.

Researchers at Cornell University estimate 226.7 of those decisions are spent on food alone - though I probably make a few more when it’s lunch time but I still end up with a Tesco Meal Deal!

If you multiply those 35,000 daily decisions by the number of days in a year and the average life expectancy of a UK male, that's 779,274,000 decisions made in a single lifetime. And from those hundreds of millions of decisions, isn’t it startling how our lives become the result of just a few?

The life of Quarter to Nine AI is no different.

Where our company is today could, I guess, be boiled down to two events and the decisions they gave rise to. The first event, a conversation between two childhood friends. The second, a lecture given by an NHS Doctor that etched the following statement in my mind for decades:

“How do you measure prevention? Unfortunately, we can’t. And, if we can’t measure something, we can’t get funding. That’s just the way it works.”

Bobby and I met as children. We grew up on the same street and bonded over a mutual love of hip-hop, sci-fi, and fantasy - interests that made us both social outcasts at the time but kept us close from childhood to adulthood, and eventually led to us becoming flat mates in our twenties.

At that time, we were both working in London and like most young professionals living in the city, it wasn’t uncommon for us to unwind after work over a few drinks.

The last time I saw him was no different.

That night, we were doing the rounds at our regular spots and everything seemed fine. Though Bobby mentioned he was “finding things a bit difficult”, I chose not to probe. For whatever reason - immaturity or a discomfort with vulnerability - I brushed his comments off as ‘throwaway statements’ and focused on keeping the night light with brotherly chat instead, laughing and joking about the things we never grew out of.

Little did I know however what my friend was really trying to say. Little did I know, until hours later, when I arrived home to find Bob had taken his own life.

I will never forget the moment of opening the door and seeing his body. I can clearly remember the conversation when I called the ambulance. I had absolutely no idea what to do.

I felt incredibly disoriented like my brain hadn’t caught up to what my eyes were seeing. The rug of my existence was being swept from right underneath my feet.

I was numb and couldn’t do anything but replay the conversation that we had. The choices and the words I used or could have used may have made a difference. We can all speculate, but it’s a regret and a scar that I carry with me to this day.

I have replayed the hours leading up to this countless times - revisiting the conversations we’d had, agonising over the choice of words, what I used (and the ones I didn’t). And the question I’ve dedicated my life to answering since that moment is,

“What did I miss?”

After Bobs’s passing, my own battle with suicide and depression began. Paralysed by guilt and unable to process the event, I booked a one-way flight to Morocco. And for 6 months, I swapped my career at one of the most powerful tech companies in the world, for olive farming in a mountain village 15,000 miles away. It was in those remote settings however that Quarter to Nine AI was born.

“Through time, and my ‘safety network’, certain scars began to heal. A few career changes later, I had a desire to turn my negative experiences into positive change.”

The Algorithm

A few months into my stay, I began toying with an algorithm (initially, this was nothing more than an experiment, a distraction, a tool designed to impress my colleagues back home). I programmed the algorithm to identify what kind of emotional state I was in by tracking the baseline of my voice. As a result, the algorithm was then able to spot changes in my mood by identifying micro-changes in my voice. I have to stress though, at this point there was very little science in the product.

From this, I programmed it to trigger an action when it sensed that I was stressed or upset; for example, by playing music that would calm me down (classical, of course) or cheer me up (Oasis, stereotypical Manc here).

The algorithm in the last ten years has snowballed into an incredible tool that now uses facial recognition (assessing the micro expressions on your face based off the ground-breaking work by Dr Paul Ekman), online behaviour, neural networking, natural language processing and biometrics to learn the characteristics and patterns of a user and look out for changes in behaviour.

If Big Data can predict when a woman is pregnant before she has the inclination to get a pregnancy test, then why can’t we do the same with mental health and other health conditions? If we think big surely another world is possible if products are built for the betterment of users and not to sell shit to them.

“Things began to snowball and that all-important question from way back when, “How can you measure prevention?” began to look more achievable.”

It is from this humble tech concept that Quarter to Nine AI was born, but not before going through a couple of iterations first…

Quarter to Nine AI

Since Bobby’s passing, my passion for trying to understand (and prevent) suicide has led me (and Quarter to Nine AI) down an evolutionary and innovative path.

From an experiment designed for my own amusement, to an online forum that supports people affected by suicide, to a workplace wellbeing platform, to where we are today: a group of companies dedicated to using new and emerging technologies to solve real-world problems like suicide, homelessness, and health inequalities.

We have created holistic health apps underpinned by our tech, we have designed games that work in conjunction with your biometrics to create improved, healthier habits all this whilst feeding your data back to you with a brand new data model that empowers the user to own and manage their own data and make better life choices.

We are beyond excited to get the show on the road, and where we are now is only because of the numerous mistakes and variations of the project that has been moulded by some incredible minds in tech, science and medicine. To throw into the mix - we have the lived experiences and extensive research involving over 3,000 people who’ve been affected by suicide or attempted to take their own life assisting with laying down the path for us to tread on.

I hope that through the work we’ve done so far, and the work we continue to do, we’ll soon be able to use technology to prevent people from reaching the point of suicide; by filling the gap that human intuition leaves.

Choices are what define us so let’s choose to build another world, it is possible if we believe in it.

Omar Latif
CEO & Founder