LUNGY
Next-generation breathing exercises for you to relax, recover & stay healthy.
My Role
3 months as a lead interaction design consultant.
I defined the core interactions, the features and the visual UI design for the MVP.
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Background
What is LUNGY?
LUNGY is designed to improve your breathing in a fun way, so people can do more of what they love, without feeling short of breath.
It helps with long-COVID, asthma, COPD, sickle cell disease, and recovery after an operation.
How it started
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The CEO is a doctor who has a passion for combining design and technology to create innovative healthcare services and tools, through his company Pi-A. He liked the design approach I used for my SORA project, for which I created visuals that help people understand bad air quality in a playful and positive way. This playful approach engaged people to a negative situation, and promotes positive action.
Technology
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LUNGY makes the breathing exercises accessible. Recent innovations allow a smartphone microphone to measure a flow and volume of a breath, to replace a spirometer.
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A combination of microphone and camera input detects breathing
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The microphone currently just uses a filtered audio signal in the range <500Hz; could implement ML/AI recognition of breathing
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The camera is used to ensure the distance to the face is consistent, can be used to create prior probability of breath detection OR, can detect the orientation of the head to move a cursor and subsequently interact via breath.
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My mission was to design a playful user experience that lowers the barrier to exercise, and make it more engaging.
Approach
Define core interaction
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Build the interaction & visual language
Define the MVP for launch
Test and iterate
Core interaction
LUNGY is not a medical treatment tool, however it is established that breathing exercises can improve health outcomes.
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Gamified exercise engages people and monitor their performance.
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User group : Age 7-all
Relaxation, recovering from operation, lung diseases (Asthma, COPD), wind instrument player, sports player.
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The benefit we want to create is an interactive visual to gamify the exercise. Without breathing exercise the user can play with the interactive visual art help to reduce stress.
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Playful environment
Meditative visual effect
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Guide to improve breathing flow
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See data from each breath
1. Playful environments, meditative visual effects
Enter a playful environment rather than an exercise room.
The user can play the interactive visual art without starting the exercise. The variation of the visual is designed to deliver a meditative experience. A simple touch or blow interaction manipulates the meditative elements.
Touch interaction
Breath interaction
Each visualisation cycles through colour schemes to reduce monotony
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Generative visual art ideas
Fabric
Waves
Comets
Coral
Dandelions
Chlandni
Aurora
Gravity
Nebula
Schools
Rainfall
Haku
Boxes
Murmurations
Stress Balls
Easy, gamified way to understand the data
I invented an easy and fun way to understand the volume of breath, and added gamification to encourage to achieve more volume from the exercise.
Volume unit design
An average volume of breath is less than 500ml
Total volume indicator
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Home screen
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Home screen
2. Guide to improve breathing flow
Practicing consistency of the flow is impactful and effective to improve the breath.
The mic captures and visualise the volume and speed of the breath. The user can see the flow progress in real-time.
Flow guide
Flow analysis
3. See the data of each breath
The report presents your breathing data in a way that is easy to understand
How much did you breathe out during the session – was it the volume of a tennis ball or a watermelon?! Have you managed to have a constant flow?!
The performance report
MVP System Flow
Launched beta screen
Getting feedback
Minimum serviceable product for the beta launch.
"It will be really useful if I can receive my patient's exercise data."
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physiotherapist
"I will definitely use it at work when I need a meditation."
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Security staff
It is fun to play. The tutorial is quite understandable.
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Sound developer
Result
Product
We pushed the boundaries, combining tech, art and design to bring a unique and beautiful experience to help respiratory disease and stress.
My interaction designs contributed to lower the pressure to start the exercise and gives a playful perspectives.
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Business
My design process delivered a sellable MVP.
It defined a unique product position in the market and maximise the benefit of IP.
The business is ready to sell the premium subscription model.
The app is available as a beta version. The launch date is in September 2022.
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What I've learnt
People instantly engage with interesting visuals and show more effort to interact with them.
Regardless of having respiratory symptom, building exercise routine and keeping motivation requires the same effort for everyone.
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Complex visualisations require a low poly method of implementation. It decreases the detail of expression but we are expecting the rapidly growing GPU industry will solve this issue soon. I can see the progress every year.
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Bespoke UI components need longer research and development time, but they contribute to a unique product, and give a distinctive look, feel and identity for differentiation in the market.
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