Bean | Devpost

Bean

Inspiration

Nearly 1 in 10 babies in the U.S. spend time in a NICU. The average wait for a parent's first hold is over six days. Six days. The senses that matter most for a newborn's development — touch, warmth, rhythm, presence — are invisible to every monitor in the room. We wanted to change that.

What Bean Does

Bean is a co-regulation system: a companion app paired with a smart swaddle that lets NICU parents deliver touch when they can't be there. A parent presses and holds their phone. The swaddle responds with warmth, gentle pressure, and breathing rhythm. On screen, particles gather and a message appears: "Your baby is settling into your touch." For parents, Bean offers guided touch sessions, breathing rituals, and a constellation map of every moment of connection. For nurses, it surfaces co-regulation data that doesn't exist anywhere in current NICU care — resonance waveforms, comfort indicators, and handoff notes that carry emotional context between shifts.

How We Built It

We prototyped Bean in Figma, grounding every decision in research: CT-afferent touch receptors, kangaroo care outcomes, NICU parent mental health, nurse compassion fatigue. That research shaped a full persona framework — sensory needs, emotional pain points, intervention moments — which became the backbone of every screen. The parent interface uses warm peach tones. The nurse interface uses cool blue-cream. Each visual language tells you instantly whose world you're in.

What Was Hard

Designing for two completely different users in one product meant holding two contradictory truths at once: parents need emotional warmth, no clinical data. Nurses need clinical efficiency, fast. We had to build a system where both perspectives feed each other — without either user seeing the other's raw data. The touch session screen went through more iterations than anything else. Dark backgrounds made the particle effects pop but broke the warmth of every other screen. The hardest part, though, was language. Numbers feel clinical. Scores feel like grades. Rewriting "co-regulation index: 74%" into something a sleep-deprived mother can receive without spiraling took more work than redesigning the particle system.

What We're Proud Of

Bean doesn't look like a baby monitor or a health tracker. The constellation journey, the particle touch interaction, the co-regulation waveform — these are novel visualizations built specifically for this problem. More than that: the parent flow and nurse flow aren't two separate apps. They're one connected system. A parent's touch becomes a nurse's co-regulation waveform. A nurse's handoff note includes a parent's emotional state. The baby's settling response feeds back to both. That closed loop is what makes Bean a system, not just an interface.