Felt - "Your body knew. Now you will too."

Inspiration

Many women in postpartum recovery and perimenopause describe feeling randomly overwhelmed, touched out, or unlike themselves, with no language to explain why. They apologize. They withdraw. They are told it is stress, or anxiety, or personality. Medicine tracks symptoms. Wellness tech tracks steps and sleep. Nothing tracks how the world feels against your skin. 80% of perimenopausal women go undiagnosed for over two years. Two years of apologizing for reactions they couldn't explain. Two years of withdrawing from touch, from noise, from the people they love. Two years of reduced quality of life, strained relationships, and delayed care, not because the science doesn't exist, but because no one made it legible.

Women don't lack data. They lack a readable map of their own nervous system. FELT is that map.

What it does

FELT is a speculative sensory interface that visualizes sensory threshold volatility during postpartum recovery and perimenopause. A soft biosensing patch models biometric inputs, skin conductance, micro temperature variance, heart rate variability, and muscle tension, to build a personal baseline of sensory stability. The app translates this into a daily sensory forecast: five organic, breathing forms representing touch, sound, smell, warmth, and emotion.

Users can see which thresholds are elevated on any given day, track patterns across weeks, and share simplified views with partners or clinicians. What was previously felt as chaos becomes a readable rhythm.

How we built it

We designed and prototyped FELT entirely in Figma Design and Figma Make. The prototype spans three core screens, sense tuning and partner sharing , onboarding, the daily sensory forecast, and the sense detail view — built as a fully navigable, animated experience. The onboarding ends with a dynamic petal bloom, one petal per sense the user flags, each coloured in that sense's palette tone, making the app feel immediately personal from the first interaction.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest problem was making data feel soft. Wellness apps default to charts, scores, and alerts. We had to completely rethink how to surface biometric information in a way that felt intimate rather than clinical.

We started by exploring anxiety and mental health, but that space is saturated. We kept asking: where does a real gap exist, and where can design move the needle for people who are genuinely underserved? That led us to hormonal transitions and the invisible experience of sensory overwhelm. From there the visual language emerged, five petals representing five senses, each coloured in its own palette tone, depicting the actual feeling from the inside out. Then the garden as a week. The whole system grew from that one image.

Every time we added information, we asked whether it made the experience feel safer or more anxious. Most of the time, we removed it.

What we learned

Designing for perception required restraint. Removing scores, alerts, and gamification made the experience more human, not less useful. We learned that making invisible bodily shifts legible can be more impactful than adding more data.

One of the most liberating parts of this challenge was being freed from feasibility. Not asking "can we build this" but "what would genuinely move the needle for this person" unlocked a completely different quality of thinking. It pushed us past the obvious solutions and toward something that felt true. Speculative design works best when it is grounded in a specific, undeniable human need, not a technology looking for a problem. The women we designed for already knew something was wrong. We just needed to give it a shape.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a fully animated, navigable prototype with onboarding, a home screen sensory forecast, and a sense detail view with a scrubbable 48-hour landscape timeline, all cohesive in a single design language that feels nothing like existing wellness tools.

But the accomplishment we are most proud of is the reaction when we showed it to people. Every woman we showed it to paused, then said some version of "owwww, yesss, this is exactly it." They didn't know they needed it until they saw it. That told us we had found a real gap, not one that is loud and obvious, but one that lives quietly in the daily experience of millions of women who have simply learned to apologize for how they feel.

The partner view and clinical export address two completely different use cases, intimate communication and medical conversation, within the same calm interface. No gamification. No scores. No alerts. The safety, the color, the analogy of petals and a garden, the slowness of the interactions, every decision was intentional. The app has a point of view. It knows what it refuses to be.

What's next for Felt - "Your body knew. Now you will too."

Deeper cycle integration, with the sensory forecast shifting colour and tone based on cycle phase. Expansion beyond postpartum and perimenopause to every hormonal transition a woman may experience, PCOS, hormonal contraception, surgical menopause, and the shifts that come with no diagnosis at all but are felt every day regardless. A clinician dashboard for longitudinal pattern sharing, giving care teams the kind of data that currently doesn't exist in any medical record. And a community layer, anonymised, opt-in pattern sharing so women can see they are not alone in what they feel.

The longer vision is simpler: every woman, at every stage of her hormonal life, should have access to a readable map of her own nervous system. FELT is the beginning of that.