Align

Inspiration 80% of adults will experience back pain in their lifetime, yet the damage starts building months before any symptoms appear. We noticed that every existing solution — posture buzzers, ergonomic products, physical therapy — is either annoying and ignored, or expensive and reactive. Nobody shows you the invisible structural damage accumulating in your body right now. We asked: what if you could actually see it before pain arrives? What it does ALIGN is a posture erosion recovery system that gives users a new sense: Structural Load Accumulation Awareness. Humans have 22-33+ senses including proprioception (body position awareness), but proprioception has a critical blind spot — it cannot perceive cumulative mechanical stress building over days and weeks. ALIGN fills this gap through three interfaces:

ALIGN Wear — Smart clothing with 12 micro-pressure sensors that continuously track structural load at 9 body zones. Communicates through haptic nudges embedded in the fabric — no screen needed. Daily App — A Body Stress Map that visualizes invisible damage as glowing heat zones (green to coral). Includes zone-specific deep dives with root cause analysis, pain prediction timelines, a personalized daily recovery protocol, an AI assistant, and a research-backed exercise library with 8 poses. Weekly Intelligence — Posture score trends, monthly pattern discovery, movement intelligence with smart sitting timers, and anonymized community benchmarks.

The system detects structural load through sensors, enhances perception by making the invisible visible through the Body Stress Map, and manipulates the sensory input through haptic correction, targeted exercises, and timed protocols that redistribute load away from critical zones. How we built it We designed and prototyped the entire system in Figma over the build weekend. We used Figma Make to generate initial screen layouts and illustrations, then refined every screen manually in Figma. The prototype includes 22+ connected screens covering the complete user journey: splash screen, authentication, 4-step onboarding, Body Stress Map with tappable zones, zone detail analysis, daily recovery protocol, exercise library with pose illustrations, correct posture guides, weekly trajectory, monthly insights, movement intelligence, community chat, AI assistant, safeguards system, and calm mode. The presentation was built in Figma Slides with embedded prototype screenshots. Challenges we ran into Designing a data-heavy health tool without overwhelming users was our biggest challenge. We solved it through progressive disclosure — daily interactions take 10 seconds (glance at the stress map), weekly reviews take 2 minutes, and monthly deep dives take 5 minutes. We also struggled with making the exercise illustrations anatomically accurate and spent time verifying every pose against medical sources. Balancing between showing enough data to be useful and not so much that it causes anxiety (which we address through Calm Mode) required careful design thinking. Accomplishments that we're proud of

The Body Stress Map visualization that makes invisible damage tangible and emotional The complete safeguards system, especially Calm Mode which auto-hides metrics when users check obsessively — a tool designed to prevent its own misuse The "Built to Leave" philosophy — ALIGN gradually reduces its presence after 90 days and teaches users to read their own body signals, designed to become unnecessary Research-backed exercise recommendations with real citations from JOSPT, ACP Guidelines, and Annals of Internal Medicine The AI Assistant that translates raw posture data into plain-language guidance 22+ screen prototype covering every touchpoint of the user journey

What we learned We learned that the best health tools aren't the ones with the most features — they're the ones that surface the right information at the right time. We also learned that designing for body awareness means designing for emotional sensitivity. Language matters: saying "erosion" instead of "bad posture" completely changes how users feel about the data. And we learned that ethical safeguards aren't a checkbox — they're core product design decisions that should be designed first, not added last. What's next for ALIGN

Developing functional smart clothing prototypes with real micro-pressure sensors Building the AI prediction model that projects pain onset based on cumulative load patterns Conducting user research with remote workers, students, and office professionals Exploring partnerships with physical therapists to validate the exercise recommendation engine Testing the 90-day independence training model to see if users actually develop lasting body awareness

Built With

• figma
• figma-make
• figma-slides