Interview: Recovery Cat in Day-to-Day Psychiatric Care

We asked Dr. Kaminski to share his experiences developing and implementing Recovery Cat as a spin-off from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In the interview, Dr. Kaminski talks about how the medical device Recovery Cat Medical shapes his work with patients and how the tool is used in practice:

What problem does Recovery Cat Medical solve?

Recovery Cat Medical lets patients capture important data between sessions — often spanning several weeks. In follow-up appointments, clinicians rely heavily on how patients remember those weeks, and treatment decisions are based on that. This is already a challenge on its own, made worse by recall bias. When you ask someone how they've been feeling over the past few weeks, their current mood often distorts their answers. The time between appointments stays a black box. Recovery Cat Medical gives patients another way to report on themselves, focused on the topics that actually matter for the work you're doing together.

How is Recovery Cat Medical used day-to-day in treatment?

Early warning signs and preventing relapse are central concerns for patients who are often under significant strain. You typically start with one or two core questions on topics relevant to the condition — things like sleep quality or general wellbeing. But early warning signs are highly individual. In conversation, you can suggest questions ("I'm withdrawing socially" or "I'm experiencing more racing thoughts"), but patients decide what fits for them. If a patient says "For me it always starts with not tidying my apartment," that gets picked up as an important signal by the clinician.

Focusing only on warning signs can be demotivating, though. Working together with patients and clinicians during development, we found it's just as important to track resources and positive aspects. "What gave me energy today?" matters as much as questions about symptoms or side effects.

How much time does Recovery Cat take up in patient consultations?

Recovery Cat isn't a replacement for the conversation — it's a support for getting into it. Instead of spending 15 minutes painstakingly reconstructing how the last few weeks went, you can spend 2 minutes looking at the dashboard and immediately go deeper: "I see something changed last week — what happened?" That makes the shared time much more valuable. It's also a democratization of therapy: clinician and patient are both looking at the same data, meeting as equals.

How does Recovery Cat Medical fit into the course of treatment?

It's worth introducing Recovery Cat early, once a solid working relationship is in place. It helps enormously with psychoeducation — patients learn to better understand their condition and recognize their own resources through regular use. Often a difference is noticeable within two to four weeks. The first time you look at the data together in a session and see, for example, how poor sleep and elevated drive occur together — being able to name that clearly as a risk factor for a hypomanic episode, based on self-reported data, is a huge aha moment for both patient and clinician. We now have patients who've been using the tool for several years. It provides security, especially in stable phases — keeping the gradual changes in view and helping to cushion crises before they hit.

You didn't set out to found a startup. What motivated you to move from passive observer to active participant in the digital transformation of the German healthcare system?

I started in basic research at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. Later I moved to Charité in Berlin to do more clinically oriented research. Since my specialist training, I've focused on people with severe mental illness — including psychotic disorders and affective conditions like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. When I experienced this black box problem firsthand in everyday clinical life, I didn't want to wait for someone else to solve it. I wanted to bring my own idea into clinical practice myself. That's what's driven my engagement in the digital transformation of care ever since.