Attune — Hear your body again

Inspiration: We started by looking at gut health as it is everywhere on social media, and has created a wave of anxiety around food even for people who are completely healthy. That got us thinking: if figuring out what’s happening with our own bodies is already this overwhelming without any underlying condition, what is it like for someone living with an eating disorder on top of all that noise? For many patients, internal signals like hunger, fullness, and metabolic responses are genuinely hard to perceive. This leaves clinicians relying on delayed tests and self-reported behaviors that are not always accurate. As we explored interoception in relation to eating disorders, we realized that this disconnect is exactly the gap Attune was designed to close.

What it does: Attune is a two-part interoceptive health system. A discreet wearable patch we designed called the Integrated Interoceptive Biomarker Monitor (IIBM) tracks biomarkers behind hunger like glucose, cortisol, ghrelin, leptin, HRV, GLP-1, etc, and feeds two separate experiences. For the patient, a mobile app presents that data across three screens: Garden, a living visual that reflects the body's state without triggering numbers; Grow, which gives users a general summary of what's happening with their body every 3 hours and then progressively unlocks analytical data as trust builds with the care team; and Gather, where daily growth from flowers, no matter how affected they are from varying factors, can be turned into a bouquet which can be saved privately or gifted to loved ones as a message of progress. For the clinician, a full web dashboard surfaces everything that happens between appointments like biomarker trends, flagged anomalies, lab results, and patient pre-visit submissions so health care professionals can act before a crisis, not after.

How we built it: We started with research where we identified the real gaps in eating disorder treatment, including underreporting and the lag in clinical data. From there we built two personas: Celine, a 17-year-old with anorexia navigating recovery, and Dr. Reyes, a clinician making treatment decisions with incomplete information. Using Figma Make, and prompting from ChatGPT and Claude, we designed two distinct design systems sharing one brand language, mapped through the hero's journey framework to keep every feature anchored to a real user need. The deliverables included a CGM-inspired wearable patch, a patient app built around non-triggering visuals, a clinical dashboard, and 3D product visualizations to show how the system would work in practice.

Challenges we ran into: One of the biggest challenges was finding the right tone. Eating disorder recovery is a sensitive topic so if the design felt too clinical it could seem cold, but if it felt too playful it could feel irresponsible. We spent a lot of time trying to find a balance that felt supportive while still respecting the seriousness of the issue. We also had to rethink typical health tech design. Instead of showing raw metrics, we focused on representing how the body feels, which meant questioning many of our usual UX instincts. Because of the sensitivity of the topic, we relied heavily on secondary research to guide our decisions. We wanted to make sure our decisions were grounded in credible sources, especially since we didn’t have the time to conduct primary research with patients or clinicians. On the technical side, working in Figma Make had some limitations that forced us to rebuild parts of the design multiple times. We also spent too long early on refining the concept, which made the rest of the timeline tighter. The last major challenge we faced was one of our teammates dropping out midway through the project, so the two of us carried it to the end. It was difficult, but we’re proud of what we built.

Accomplishments that we're proud of: Gather is the feature we’re most proud of. It turns a biomarker check-in into a flower, and over time those flowers become bouquets that can be shared with someone you care about. The idea that recovery can create something beautiful only works if the entire system supports it, and we believe Attune does. We're also proud of how different the patient app and clinical dashboard feel from each other, while still being the same product. They serve different emotional needs and they honor that. Most of all, we built something that puts empathy first, a system where technology helps people reconnect with their bodies, not fear them.

What we learned: Designing for a broken sense requires restraint. Every instinct in health tech pushes toward more data, more visibility, more alerts but for our persona, Celine, more can cause harm. The most important design decision we made wasn't what to show. It was what to hide, and when. We also learned that patients and clinicians aren't just two user types but they also have two completely different relationships with the same data. One needs objectivity. The other needs gentleness. Designing for both at once pushed us to think about design as translation, not just communication. Lastly, this project showed us the real potential of speculative design imagining what biosensing technology could do for healthcare when it's built around people, not just data.

What's next!: First, clinical validation where we can pilot with real patients and clinicians to test whether Attune's approach actually works in practice. Then, expansion. Attune was built for Celine, but she represents one corner of a much larger community as an anorexia patient. Eating disorders are a spectrum with types like bulimia, BED, ARFID, etc, and each diagnosis has a different physiological story that calls for different biomarkers, different visual language, and a different emotional tone. Expanding across that full spectrum is our most important next step. Beyond eating disorders, the Integrated Interoceptive Biomarker Monitor (IIBM) patch has the potential to support any condition where the body’s internal signaling becomes difficult to interpret such as chronic pain, metabolic disorders, diabetes, and stress-related conditions by continuously interpreting patterns across multiple physiological signals and translating complex internal responses into insights that both patients and clinicians can understand and act on.The Gather feature also opens the door for a new kind of recovery support. In group therapy cohorts, individual therapy, or even with friends and family, patients can share their flowers with one another thus creating a small but meaningful way to recognize the invisible work of getting better and build community around it. Ultimately, Attune aims to become the infrastructure layer for interoceptive health, the first platform designed around a sense that medicine has largely overlooked.

Built With

• canva
• chatgpt
• claude
• figma
• figmamake