Project overview
Meltdowns often go unrecognized until it happens.
A meltdown, often triggered by sensory overload, is an intense stress response with some users describe emotional and physical symptoms like having intrusive thoughts, body pain, and an urgent need to withdraw. Moreover, for individuals with autism or ADHD or alexithymia, emotions can feel intense but difficult to name.
While meltdowns have serious bodily reactions, another challenge is catching early signs. As our poll with neurodivergent users shows, users struggle most with identifying and understanding overwhelming signals before they peak.
Problem statement
Current tools lack support to address neurodivergent users’ struggle with recognizing and regulating emotions.
Breaking down the key problem
Current market divided in two directions
Moreover, to be minded
Solution direction
How might we tailor personal emotion regulation strategy and detect early signs of meltdowns?
Early Concept Testing
With client's interests in exploring how smart watches can tag and track emotions, we produced storyboards, wireframes, and loFis to conduct testing with target users and collect initial user feedback.
More steps, more friction points
Users expressed interests in the quick tap action but were hesitant about using smart watches especially when they are in meetings and presentations.
Journaling creates incremental loads
Time-based journal creates emotional clutter where sometimes user prefer to have reflections as something optional.
Final solution
Empowering with gestures and cues that matter
Feature 1 - Onboarding
Users shared the difficulty of recognizing emotions in the moment. To reduce friction while still leveraging smart wearables, we we explored tactile, low-tech logging methods, eventually leading up to a bracelet with onboarding flow where users pair simple gestures (like a squeeze) with emotions cues they want to track.
Instead of asking for full emotional detail, we focus on relevant signals shared by user, like “shutdown” or sensitive to noise, making the experience discreet and minimally disruptive to daily life.
Feature 2 - documentation
Users can revisit their day through a structured summary. To avoid data overload, we highlight just the most meaningful patterns , including when emotions occurred, how frequently, and whether any other triggers (like noise or heart rate) were involved.
