Cipher

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  Process of detecting high cortisol

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  Setup screen

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  Reflections screen

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  Analyzing singular state screen

Inspiration

We kept noticing the same thing around us — smart, capable women in college completely blindsided by their own bodies. Exhausted for no reason. A whole new wave of changes once again. Emotionally in ways they couldn't explain. Stressed beyond what the workload should warrant. The conversation was always "I don't know why I feel like this." We started asking: but what if you could know? What if the answer was already there, in data your body is already producing?

What it does

Cipher is a hormonal intelligence app for college women. It connects to wearables like Apple Watch and Oura Ring to passively track biometrics — HRV, skin temperature, sleep stages, and heart rate, and uses those signals to infer your hormonal state in real time. When a changes occur in your body, Cipher not only informs you, but also collects patterns for you to learn from.

How we built it

We built it entirely through Figma and conversation about common experiences.

Challenges we ran into

As we anticipate that many experienced the same challenge of a plethora of ideas as we did. Even though we narrowed down ideas, it still exploded with a million pathways to take Cipher into. It took us many conversations about our own personal experiences to make a final decision on something we could talk about best.

Another challenge was preventing it from just being another dashboard by making sure every piece of information served a sort of action that the user could take to learn more or ground themselves.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the whimsy yet still informative layout we made. Designing for women's health requires a completely different tone than most health apps use. The default is either overly clinical or aggressively feminine. We learned we could achieve a neutral yet empathetic platform.

What we learned

We learned a lot more about ourselves and hormones than we anticipated, which helped us to shape our design decisions. We were surprised to find out how much simple information we did not know about hormones, and now we can put some of this knowledge into practice.

What's next for Cipher?

The immediate next step is a pilot with a small group of college women to validate whether the hormonal patterns we're inferring from wearable data actually match their lived experience.

Secondly, we want a more intuitive platform. This would mean one layer deep into the user’s activity, the calendar. We would like the idea for Cipher to detect if the user is overbooking themselves or if certain activities align up with bodily stress or certain moods, so it can do such features such as set time aside for a break or show some hidden insight into our day-to-day living.

Built With

• figma