Echo Sense

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Inspiration

Echo Sense was inspired by a simple idea: emotions don’t always end when the moment does. A stressful event may last a few minutes, but the emotional effect can quietly influence our focus, mood, and decisions for hours. While exploring this, we looked into interoception, the body’s internal sensing system that detects signals like heart rate changes, breathing patterns, and physical tension. These signals often appear before we consciously recognize an emotion. This led us to imagine a system that could help people see and understand how emotions evolve and linger over time.

What it does

Echo Sense is a speculative emotional sensing system that combines a wearable device with a mobile app. The wearable detects physiological signals such as heart rate variability and stress indicators. The app then visualizes these signals as emotional states, showing users: current emotional signals emotional peaks and timelines patterns in emotional carryover quick reset exercises like guided breathing The goal is not to diagnose emotions, but to help users notice emotional carryover and recover intentionally.

How we built it

We designed the prototype using Figma for the interface and interaction flows. Figma Make helped us explore early layout and data visualization ideas, which we later refined to match our design style and emotional UI system. We used Figma Slides for the presentation and ChatGPT to support brainstorming, writing, and generating visual concepts.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was finding the right way to visualize emotional data clearly. We experimented with different graphs and layouts to show how emotions change and linger over time. Figma Make helped us generate early ideas quickly, but we later refined those designs to better match our concept and interface style. Another challenge was ensuring the system didn’t appear overly certain about emotions. To address this, Echo Sense presents signal confidence instead of certainty, and allows users to edit detected emotions or add context.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of turning the idea of emotional carryover into a clear visual experience. We also created a cohesive emotional design language using emotion avatars and color-coded states, inspired by emotional visualization frameworks and expanded with additional emotions like calm and excitement.

What we learned

This project helped us understand how difficult it is to design around internal human experiences like emotions. We learned that emotional technology must prioritize clarity, empathy, and user control, especially when interpreting sensitive personal signals.

What's next for Echo Sense

Future versions could help users learn more about their emotions, understand how different emotions interact, and detect early signals of emotional escalation. Echo Sense explores how technology could support greater emotional awareness and self-reflection in everyday life.

Built With

• chatgpt
• figma
• make
• slides