A Sub-heath/wellness wearable that combines multiple features (temperature, colored lighting, vibrations and visuals) to provide immersive meditation that relieves short-term symptoms of anxiety. This project was a collaboration with Kuo-Jui Hung and ChiehPing Chen in which we were tasked to design a healthcare wearable that fits within Panasonic’s product portfolio and tackles social wellness, sub-health or cardiovascular disease symptoms, to be released at SXSW 2017.

Role: conducted ethnographic research, led creative sessions and executed solution grid, team mediation, prepared client presentation content, prototyping, product illustrations, branding, logo development and marketing mock-ups

Fun Fact! Our original design was a pin wearable that mimicked one’s heart rate to guide it’s pace back down, 4 months into our prototyping we discovered that a healthcare company with more than 9 years of research was launching a wearable with the same value proposition and more advanced functions!

Featured in the 2017 Parsons School of Design Immersive Storytelling Symposium, the 2017 NYC Media Lab Demo Expo and the 2017 Maker Faire

Halcyon is an immersive experience, that engages multiple senses.

Halcyon is a healthcare wearable that was developed to improve social wellness, it aims to soothe multiple symptoms of social anxiety through immersive meditation. It combines vibrations, lighting and temperature manipulation with the engaging visual nature of VR to provide a unique sensorial experience. By converting common unsustainable digital-based coping mechanisms into a new productive and engaging self- help practice it is infiltrating an untapped market of social health and wellness. It integrates VR with self-care through more than meditation videos, moving away from VR as simply a tool for entertainment.

functions

The product  has a foldable design so that it's portable and more appealing. The lenses fold in half, the cover is connected with a magnet and  the cellphone compartment shrinks.  Despite various features (lighting, massage and temperature), the screen and VR part of the design comes from your phone. This makes it more accessible as all you need to use this wearable is your phone, which you already carry,  and our app!

the app 

The Halcyon app allows users to customize their expirience according to their preferences and share saved preferences with each other, creating a community for the users.

Prototypes & User TrIALS

We explored multiple forms of wearables and placements in the body. Our initial design was based on a hand held wearable that users could use to help synchronize their heartbeat in anxiety triggering moments. The pictures bellow show user testing and prototyping. Before we landed on a headset form of wearable, we explored similar functions as hand held and pin-able options. We conducted in depth user trials as part of our research were we simulated stressful moments to see how our features affected the users.

We decided to focus on anxiety while exploring wellness and sub-health in people our age. We noticed that anxiety was a highly prevalent condition that was even more likely to manifest in university students. Our primary research included stakeholder mapping, graffiti walls around campus, interviews, cultural probes, journey mapping and empathy mapping. Once we settled on designing a wearable to tackle symptoms of anxiety, we decided to conduct in depth secondary research around the specific features that can be imbedded into wearables to soothe symptoms of anxiety like visual stimulation, lighting, vibration, temperature and sound.