Why I built this

I'm not a licensed clinical psychologist, I'm not an engineer, and I'm not a coder. I'm a survivor who had the opportunity to step back, look at exactly what my struggles and pain points were, and spend the time to put it together.

I own my attempts. Post traumatic stress tried to remove me twice. I have since decided I could not allow that to happen again so I am doing something about it so that it wont.

Thirteen years now I've been living and surviving with post traumatic stress.

I pulled 35 people out of a balcony collapse in Austin, Texas about 16 years ago. I had everybody triaged by the time first responders got there. I saved everybody's life, but it nearly cost me my own. In the years after, I lost the record label, the condo on 6th Street, and everything else I had, and I moved back to North Louisiana to save myself.

A few years later, I met my wife and stepdaughter. Fast forward to the year 2018, I was injured at work, this began my journey of long painful days in bed, doctors and medication, waiting for the surgery I so desperately needed. Three neck surgeries later along with years of isolation and watching my family nearly fall apart. I had to undergo three ACDF procedures from C4-C7 and during my recovery I saw my family walk on eggshells around me due to my post traumatic stress.

So with nothing but time on my hands, I needed to do something about it, I began my research journey. I wanted to know if I could manifest it so others could see I was hurt. So I could remember I was hurt.

I wish I had a scar, a bruise, or a cast. Something so others could know if I was hurt, or if I was getting better.

It's that cast I wish I had. It's a scar I wish I had, just so people could know I was getting better, or I wasn't. When everyone looks at me and says it's ok — well it's not — my world is crashing.

Every part of SIX came out of something that happened to me

I went through thirteen years of this, wrote down every place it kept costing me, and built the answer to each one. That is where the device came from, and there is nothing in it that came from anywhere else.

Because of my fight with it I have realized how currently it is invisible to anyone really looking for it. You can't fight an enemy you can't see, right. I thought that seeing the triggers happen would give me and the medical teams something to see so we could know when treatment or medications were or were not working.

That is why SIX measures anything at all. It puts the event on the record while it is happening, so the people trying to help have something in front of them besides what I managed to remember three days later. It does not tell anybody what is wrong with me.

My post traumatic stress is different from everybody else's, and I know that was one of the things I was running into — everybody's post traumatic stress is different, so why the hell are they still using population averages?

That is why SIX learns the person wearing it and nobody else. What it knows about me is mine, and it would be no use to anybody else.

I watched my wife and daughter stand like deer in the headlights when I would drop my keys and yell and I couldn't let them do that anymore. Me being home after the injury to my neck and not working for several years I got tired of being the bad guy when I wasn't the bad guy — so that's why the buddy band was created.

That is the Buddy Band. A second band, worn by somebody you choose, so the people standing in the room with you know what is happening to you without you having to stop and find the words for it.

I did everything I could to research it and I found something that looks promising and I want to stop the nightmares so people can get the sleep they need, because I can't tell you how fearful it is just from the nightmares, but trying to go to sleep knowing they're about to happen. 24 hours a day.

That is why SIX works the night as hard as it works the day. The nightmare is one thing. Lying there knowing one is coming is another.

I know that it doesn't happen at the clinic. I don't remember all the time. Nobody else remembers it. When cognitive decline is so bad that even if we do remember we won't be able to process it later. This is why it has dual batteries and it's waterproof — to stay on.

That is why it never comes off. An episode does not wait for an appointment, and a device on a charger is watching nothing.

Making the invisible visible creates a whole other set of problems, because visibility with the stigma is what costs you everything. That's my problem statement, right there.

That is why SIX keeps almost nothing, tells nobody, and looks like a plain black band. Being believed should not cost a person their privacy, and being seen should not cost them their job.

The ultimate goal is to slow this monster down. I want to bring that 22 down. I want to be the reason they change the number — 21, then 20, then 19, and keep going, so anyone who is surviving with a mental disorder can have a fighting chance, to live a productive life, along with finding the confidence to return to society as a stronger force of nature.

— Chad Smith, founder, Sixwatch, LLC. U.S. Army, EFMB medic paratrooper.