Breathenage

A healthcare application that resonates with user's breath, help them breathe in different situations and calm them down.

Role: User Experience Design, User Research, Prototyping, User Interface Design

Tools: Sketch, InVision, PhotoShop

Concept Background

I went through huge stressful and intense study life during my master study, the emotions were affecting me and I was having unhealthy life in both physical and mental back then. Later I realized that a lot of students and workers have the same states and emotions and most of them usually do not have the awareness of their healthy under stresses.

In this project, I would like to research this phenomenon among different people and aim to try to design an experience and bring an effective way for helping people relieve stresses and avoid unhealthy states that they are unconscious going through.

Research Background

I conducted a multi-methodology research effort to better understand how people define the function of breath, relaxation and stresses, how they wish to do for focusing, reduce their stress, or relax, their meditation/relaxation/breathing experience & current use of technology, and how academic researchers have sought to explore these questions in their relative fields of study.

Analyze

By dividing ages from 18-25, 26-35, and above 35, I set 3 groups of people for the interview. Also went through the essential topics of interview and investigate, which are: 1. Stress 2. Yoga/physical exercise 3. relaxations…

After interview,

I divided interviewees to 3 groups:

1. Physical Attentioner

2. Stressful Usualler

3. Unaware of pressure and body

I did in-depth interviews with typical representatives in that 3 groups.

Physical Attentioner will do physical exercise and having a habit of adjusting their body states. They also focus on their inner breath of their body, especially during working out. But they do usually have long-term hidden stresses.

Stressful Usualler going through short-term and intense stresses. They usually do not know the better way of reduce and adjust the stress.

Unaware do not have obvious pressure and they would not care about it.

I would focus on Physical Attentioner and Stressful usualler for my target user

Persona

Insights &

Design opportunities

1. User need to relieve their pressures

◉ Have no short-time activities for relaxing

◉ Usually ignore the pressure and forget to regulate physical condition while suffering stress and/or during busy time

1. During study or work process, users usually do not have a long leisure time, however, they usually have or need a short period of time to relax themselves, which can involve activities like taking a walk after meals, drinking coffee with colleague, skretch their bodies and social apps. But these activities are not really efficiently relaxing their physicals and mental, which turns out a more nervous and anxiety situation because they think of it a time wasting.

We can help to provide an efficient short-term, entertaining relaxation in situations like sitting in office/classroom, walking after meals, chatting and having coffee with a group, etc.

Relieve stress timely are helpful for people’s health both physically and mentally, over-stress could lead to illness such as depression, anxious and unsettled, heart illness, etc. However, users usually rushing to finish their works for relieve the pressure instead of break down in the middle, so might cause heavy stressful situations.

We can help reminding user’s breathing state, which can be monitored at anytime. And remind user when breathing disorder occurs.

2. User need to control their breath for adjusting heart rates

◉ Do not know efficient ways

◉ Lack knowledge of linkage between breath and sports-related body index; lack of knowledge of what kinds of body effect can breathing adjustment bring

User do know that adjusting the breath will affect the change of hart rates. People who doing physical exercise knows adjust breath will help them get an effectively working accuracy, which is exercisers always seeking for. However, they usually do not know what the best suitable way for them to get a right “breath states” and “controlling the breath”, so they will do adjustment after trying different ways every time.

We could provide knowledge of breathing & heart rate. Guidances to help users adjust to the breathing state.

Provide efficient methods to detect and analyze different breathing states of user; detect whether the current breathing of that user is correct & relaxed & health.

3. User need to be focus on different situations

◉Usually lack of efficient ways to concentrate & long-term concentrate ability

For all kinds of target users, they all have different focus needs at different stages and different things. For example, when some users want to enter the working state, they need to carry out some "forced" mental states and actions before they can be put in, and at the same time they are easily interrupted by other things around them. And when they feel stressed and anxious, they are less likely to enter a state of concentration and long-term focus.Some of the interviewed users have been successful and quick and have long-term attention in the case of "making yourself calm," and "doing things easier to relax."

They need a quick way to focus and a long-term concentrate ability.

We could help to provide a long-term and can be focused environment to help users have a self-regulate & a habit-having ability.

Research & Ideation