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  Gutsy

Gutsy — Track What You Can't See

A speculative health tool that makes the gut-brain conversation visible.

Team: Ege Tezcan, Hyejoon Hwang, Omi Bahuguna, Ranjani R.

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Inspiration

We've always had language for the gut. Gut feeling. Gutsy. Butterflies in my stomach. Gut-wrenching. Across cultures and centuries, people have spoken about the gut as a seat of intuition and emotion — long before science could explain why.

It turns out, the science is catching up fast. The gut contains 500 million neurons, produces 90% of the body's serotonin, 50% of its dopamine, and communicates with the brain constantly through the vagus nerve. It influences mood, immunity, hormones, metabolism, and even decision-making — in real time, beneath conscious awareness.

That tension fascinated us: ancient wisdom pointing at something modern medicine is only beginning to fully map. We wanted to build a tool that sat right at that intersection — one that took the gut seriously as a sensory organ, and asked: what if you could actually read it?

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What It Does

Gutsy is a speculative mobile health tool that makes the gut-brain conversation visible. You swallow a smart capsule — the size of a vitamin — that travels your GI tract, reads its signals in real time, and sends the data straight to your phone. The app translates that data across five dimensions: Metabolic, Mental, Hormonal, Risk, and Immune — giving you a legible picture of what your gut is doing and what it means for how you feel.

The goal isn't to overwhelm you with biomarkers. It's to surface the right insight at the right moment — the kind that actually changes what you do. (You might learn that your afternoon anxiety is being triggered by your breakfast. Or that you've been eating right after a workout, in the exact window your gut goes quiet and can't absorb anything. Gutsy connects those dots.)

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How We Built It

We wanted it to feel two things above all: fun and safe. Health tools can be clinical and anxiety-inducing. We wanted the opposite: something warm, a little playful, that makes you feel more in control of your body, not more worried about it.

We started with research, building a rigorous framework around the gut-brain axis: the neural, immune, endocrine, and metabolic pathways through which the gut and brain communicate. That research shaped the five dashboard categories at the core of the app — Metabolic, Mental, Hormonal, Risk, and Immune.

From there, we moved into brand and visual identity. The gradient motifs, the dark backgrounds, the monospace type: all of it was designed to evoke something organic and internal, something you can sense but not quite see. The pill-shaped logo, the wavy gut motif threading through every screen — visual language built to match the concept. The most compelling anchor for all of it was the ingestible sensor itself. The idea that you swallow something the size of a vitamin and it reads your gut from the inside — that's not science fiction, it's Atmo Biosciences. Building around something real gave the whole project gravity.

On the UX side, we were deliberate about process. Before opening Figma Make, we mapped out a solid design system and full user flows on canvas first — making sure the logic, hierarchy, and structure were airtight before moving into high-fidelity. Only once we had key pages and a coherent system established did we bring Figma Make in. We used it to design the live view and detailed analysis pages — the parts of the product where motion and interactivity matter most. What made this work was being able to copy Figma Make outputs directly back into the design file, which meant we could prototype rapidly, see something real, and iterate without losing fidelity or momentum. It collapsed the gap between design and prototype in a way that genuinely changed how fast we could move. Every screen asks: does this change what the user does, not just what they know? That principle cut a lot of features and sharpened the ones that stayed.

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Challenges We Ran Into

Balancing science with accessibility was the central tension throughout. The gut-brain axis is genuinely complex — multiple communication pathways, dozens of biomarkers, interactions that play out over hours. Making that legible to someone checking their phone required constant editing: what do you show, what do you hide, and how do you communicate uncertainty without triggering anxiety?

Designing for the invisible pushed us formally. You can't photograph a serotonin signal. You can't screenshot a motility pattern. Every design decision — the gradient motifs, the color-coded orbs, the fluid animations — was an attempt to give visual form to something that has no natural visual representation.

Deciding what signals to surface was harder than it sounds. With so much happening in the gut, a big challenge beyond showing metrics was knowing what to leave out, and how to frame the metrics we do show. Not every signal is actionable, and not every actionable signal is appropriate for every person. We had real debates around hunger, for example. Hunger is influenced by ghrelin, a hormone produced largely in the stomach — but ghrelin is a notoriously noisy signal. It spikes on a schedule, responds to stress, and doesn't always reflect actual caloric need. Surfacing a "hunger signal" risks being misleading at best. More seriously, we had to consider the impact of communicating that metric to people for whom it could trigger disordered eating patterns. We ultimately chose not to include it as a primary metric — and that kind of decision, repeated across every dashboard category, shaped the whole product.

Scoping responsibly mattered to us. Gutsy is speculative, but we didn't want it to be irresponsible. We spent real time thinking through the ethics: how do you present health risk data without causing harm? How do you avoid creating a tool people become anxious about rather than empowered by? The way we built the experience came directly from that conversation.

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Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

The case studies. Maya and Dan aren't just personas — they're the emotional core of the product, and they're grounded in real experiences members of our team have had. The frustration of not knowing why your body feels off. The exhaustion of doing everything right and still not seeing results. Writing those stories made us realize how much power there is in showing the gut-brain connection through lived experience rather than data. The moment Maya stops her morning coffee during her period and feels like herself again — that's the whole argument for Gutsy in one sentence.

The visual system. Giving form to something invisible is genuinely hard. We're proud that the design language feels cohesive and alive without feeling clinical or scary. The gradient motifs that run through every screen were designed to evoke something organic and in motion — the kind of thing you sense but can't quite see. The bright, shifting colors do double duty: they reflect the diversity of each person's unique biome, and they mirror the different signals the gut sends. No two guts are alike, and the visual system makes that feel true. The pill itself carries a round, soft motif — approachable, not medical. Something you'd want to interact with.

The ethical framework. Most health apps don't think this hard about what they leave out. We do. The ghrelin debate, the eating disorder considerations, the decision to frame risk as "patterns worth watching" rather than diagnoses — that rigor is something we're proud of.

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What We Learned

The most surprising thing we discovered while building Gutsy is how close this future already is.

Atmo Biosciences — a real company — received FDA 510(k) clearance in June 2025 for an ingestible gas-sensing capsule the size of a vitamin. It travels the GI tract, measures hydrogen, methane, CO₂, and oxygen in real time, and transmits the data wirelessly. First human trials have already uncovered mechanisms never seen before, including a potentially new immune pathway in the stomach.

The technology isn't speculative. We extended it speculatively — imagining near-future capabilities like pH monitoring, motility pattern reading, hormonal activity proxies, and microbial metabolite signatures — but the foundation is already here.

Something else we learned that reinforced the usefulness of this tool: how unique every gut is, and how much that uniqueness goes completely unread. The composition of your gut biome affects your baseline mood, your stress resilience, your immune response, your metabolic efficiency. Two people can eat the same meal and have completely different internal experiences. No consumer tool has ever given people visibility into that. Gutsy is our attempt to change that.

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What's Next for Gutsy

We always imagined Gutsy as a tool that works best with longitudinal data. A single scan is a snapshot — useful, but limited. Used over time, tracking patterns across weeks and months, it becomes something much more powerful: a way to genuinely understand your own body, on your own terms. The vision is that people would use it regularly at first, build up a picture of how their gut behaves, and then gradually taper off — checking back in when something feels off or when they want to reassess. The goal was never to create a tool people depend on forever. It was to make people more informed about their own unique bodies, and help them move towards their healthiest version of themselves.

Built With

• figma
• javascript
• react