Child Mind Institute Launches Curious, a Mental Health Research Platform

Formerly known as MindLogger, Curious was built to help researchers and clinicians better understand how patients’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors unfold in everyday life. These insights can lead to more responsive care, more effective interventions, and stronger support systems for families navigating mental health challenges.

Created with support from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and California’s Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, Curious allows research teams to design and deploy studies with tools that are intuitive, customizable, and secure. Participants can engage with studies through the web and our mobile app, sharing information through surveys, daily check-ins, interventions, and other interactive formats — and researchers receive data that reflects real experiences, captured in real time.

Curious was designed to meet the needs of scientists, clinicians, and public health leaders who are working to improve outcomes in mental health.

Whether a team is studying anxiety in teenagers, stress among caregivers, or patient engagement with digital therapy, Curious makes it possible to create tools that are tailored to their specific study and simple for participants to use.

The Curious platform supports a wide range of data collection needs including ecological momentary assessment, behavior tracking, 3D interactive cognitive tasks, and digital interventions. Curious is open source, HIPAA-compliant, and ready to support studies in multiple languages and formats.

A powerful example of Curious in action comes from our partnership with the Lab for Scalable Mental Health at Northwestern University, led by Jessica Schleider, PhD, a leading researcher in adolescent mental health.

The Lab set out to solve a pressing challenge: Deliver brief, research-backed mental health interventions to a broad population of adolescents — efficiently, securely, and at scale.

Existing platforms couldn’t meet all the Lab’s needs. They variously lacked the flexibility to customize interventions, the simplicity needed for wide adoption, or the rigorous privacy protections required for working with sensitive mental health data.

Curious provided the foundation to meet these needs. And what emerged from our collaboration is a scalable toolset for delivering single-session interventions (SSIs) — brief exercises that help young people manage anxiety, stress, and self-doubt in actionable ways.

Working together, we developed a user-friendly, no-code builder that allows the Lab to design and launch interactive digital interventions that are both personalized and private. The builder supports anonymous participation and includes features like downloadable action plans — it also eliminates technical barriers for researchers.

The Lab has since migrated assessments used by more than 50,000 teens onto the Curious platform. With standardized delivery and seamless personalization, they’re now able to expand access to high-quality mental health support across diverse and distributed populations.

This work demonstrates how Curious can help researchers both pilot innovations and bring them to life at scale — with impacts that reach far beyond the lab.

That same scalable infrastructure powered the 10-Minute Challenge, a statewide competition in California that gave students the tools to design their own digital interventions to support healthy technology use — proving how Curious can support innovation from the classroom to the clinic.

We renamed the platform to reflect the values that guide our work. Curiosity is the heart of discovery, and Curious invites questions, welcomes complexity, and encourages exploration. Our goal is to create innovative tools that are grounded in scientific rigor and ethical practice.

You can learn more about Curious, explore our partnerships, or get in touch with our team at gettingcurious.com.

We are proud to offer Curious to nonprofit, academic, and research partners who are working to expand knowledge and improve lives. Together, we can support a future where mental health research is more inclusive, responsive, and impactful.