Sir John Kirwan believes artificial intelligence is the way of the future in mental health support, so he's created a digital version of himself to help those struggling.
The rugby legend and mental health advocate moved from a place of contemplating taking his own life 25 years ago to making it his mission to make sure others don't reach the same dark place.
He founded the app Mentemia earlier this year. It has received funding as part of the Government's $500 million Covid-19 health response package.
This morning, he told TVNZ1's Breakfast he wants New Zealand to have the best mental health statistics in the developed world, so he's exploring new ways for people to access help.
"It's been an amazing journey. Look, it was born out of the need of people getting some assistance. We think that AI and digital humans are going to be a big part of mental health in the future, so we decided to take the plunge and turn myself into a sleep coach."
Kirwan said sleep was like food for mental health, and the sleep coach helps form plans to get good rest.
"We believe that people today need the tools and techniques that I learned probably 25 years ago being incredibly unwell. So, there's just really simple tools and techniques within the app that just look after your mental wellbeing," he said.
"What we want to be able to do is give people those tools so that they can put their mental health first."
Kirwan said one of the few good things to come out of Covid-19 was people's openness to talk about the issue of mental health.
He said typically a lot of mental health support was "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff", but while psychiatrists and psychologists were important, he said "we don't want you to fall off that cliff, we want you to start working on your mental health now".
Kirwan flew to Los Angeles for a day and sat in a booth while 180 camera captured him making as many facial expressions as possible.
A Kiwi tech company then created the self-replica so users can go into the app and talk to "digital JK".
"The technology is pretty new but it's amazing and what we want to be able to do is for people to actually grow with the digital human, so it becomes like a mental wellbeing couch in your pocket," Kirwan said.
"It's going to be interesting because I'll get older and it won't," he joked.
The app is free to download, but the digital JK is only available for premium customers.
Find out more about how the app works and what his family think in the video above.
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