Fern | Devpost

Inspiration

My grandmother stopped calling first about two years ago. Nobody noticed for weeks. She wasn't sick. She wasn't angry. She just quietly stopped initiating didn't want to be a bother. That silence is what FERN is about.

Elderly loneliness is a global epidemic (WHO, 2023) but it doesn't announce itself. It arrives slowly, in unreturned messages and Sunday calls that stop happening. We wanted to design something that could feel that silence before it grew too wide.

What it does

FERN is a wearable pendant and companion app that detects when an elderly loved one is quietly withdrawing and gently signals their family before it becomes a crisis.

The pendant is worn passively. No screen, no app, no setup required for the elderly person. The family member checks a companion app that shows their loved one's emotional vitality as a living fern lush green when thriving, fading pale when distant. When they tend a voice note, a photo, a call the pendant pulses warm against their loved one's skin. She feels it. Without a single notification.

How we built it

Entirely in Figma. We studied passive wearable design (Oura Ring), warm wellness UI (Calm), and emotional storytelling from previous hackathon winners. We built a full design system colour tokens, typography scale, two-state components before touching a single screen. The prototype uses Figma Make for three key interactions: the breathing fern animation, the Tend Now → pendant pulse flow, and the pattern view tap-to-expand.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest problem was designing for two completely different users in one product. Dorothy never touches the app but she has to feel represented in it with dignity. Every signal had to be translated from data into human language. "HRV dropped" became "Hasn't initiated a call in 9 days." That translation work took longer than any visual decision.

We also had to resist making it alarming. Every instinct in wellness app design pushes toward urgency red alerts, score drops, streaks. FERN had to do the opposite. Calm. Warm. Never a number.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The pendant pulse moment. When you tap Tend Now and the screen goes dark forest green and says "She felt a warm pulse. That's you." that's the screen we're most proud of. It made us both emotional when we first saw it working.

Also: we never once showed a number in the entire app. Not a single score, percentage, or metric. The fern colour and plain human language do all the work.

What we learned

Restraint is a design decision. Every feature we removed made FERN stronger. The version from day one had notifications, streaks, and a connection score. All of it is gone. What's left is better.

We also learned that the best wellness design doesn't tell you how you're doing it shows you how someone you love is feeling. That shift from self to other changed everything.

What's next for FERN

Expanding to multiple loved ones per account. A caregiver mode for professional settings. A version for long-distance couples, not just families. And eventually working with pendant hardware manufacturers to make the physical object real. Because the pendant deserves to exist in the world.