Binty: Less Guessing, More Living

Inspiration

Rafa sits in a cramped cubicle, the noise of a hundred simultaneous calls blurring into a dull roar while a frustrated client's voice cracks in his headset. He feels his pulse start to race — a familiar tightening in his chest that usually signals a looming burnout.

Just as the world starts to feel too loud, his phone buzzes with a soft "Kangkong green" notification:

"Hi Rafa, things seem a bit heavy right now — are you okay?"

Binty doesn't wait for Rafa to ask for help. It gently sits beside him, guiding him through a quiet round of box breathing right at his desk — inhale, hold, exhale, hold — until the tightness in his chest begins to loosen and the noise of the world fades just enough to breathe again.

In that small, quiet moment, Rafa feels seen. Not by a dashboard of numbers or a list of metrics — but by something that simply noticed he was struggling and showed up anyway.

For Rafa, Binty isn't just an app — it's the companion that stays, the calm voice that says "I've got you" when everything else feels too loud. A moment of kaginhawaan in the middle of an overwhelming day.

What It Does

• Proactive check-ins — Notices when something feels off (rising heart rate, low movement, late-night patterns) and gently asks "are you okay?" before things spiral.

• In-the-moment routines — in-app routines like 4-7-8 breathing, box breathing, 5-4-3-2-1 grounding, body scan, and gratitude exercises, accessible any time you need them.

• Works without a smartwatch — phone pedometer, camera-based PPG pulse scan, and self-report check-ins.

• Personalized onboarding — Adapts to your name, goals, and intensity preference across a 7-step onboarding flow.

• Filipino-flavored design — Kangkong green, kamote gold, and cloud white. Feels like home, not a Silicon Valley dashboard.

How We Built It

• React Native + Expo (expo-router) — single codebase that ships to Android.
• Design tokens (constants/theme.ts) + a written design.md so the UI stays consistent across every screen and for any future contributor.
• Local-first state with Zustand + AsyncStorage persistence — onboarding, habits, routines, and check-ins all survive a force-quit. No backend required for the core experience.
• Modular wellness engine (features/wellness-engine/) — triggers, insight messages, and interventions live in isolated files that any designer or domain expert can edit without touching UI code.
• Swappable smartwatch abstraction — the simulator can be replaced with a real Bluetooth integration later without changing any UI code.
• Smart Personalization using the Gemini API by GOOGLE.

Challenges We Ran Into

The main challenges encountered while building Binty were ensuring the idea was backed by solid research to validate its feasibility. It was also challenging in the early stages when the mobile app encountered numerous errors — but we worked through them and eventually arrived at a stable, working build of Binty.

Built With

• expo-router
• gemini
• react-native
• tailwind