KiNE | Devpost

Inspiration

One of our team members is a student athlete in golf who spends hours daily on her technique, specifically the feeling of where her body was in space during her swing. She could watch footage, study the mechanics, and understand every correction intellectually, but translating that into physical movement felt impossible without real feedback. We started thinking about what a tool like KiNE could have done for her. Then we realized the problem was much bigger. The same invisible gap exists in gymnastics, rehabilitation, surgery, meditation, and almost any physical skill. Physical skill-building is one of the few areas where you can study endlessly and still fail to improve, not because of effort, but because your body gives you no feedback. We wanted to address that invisible gap by making proprioception and kinesthetic awareness, two senses science confirms are trainable, finally visible and measurable. The more we explored, the more we believed that unlocking the ability to sense yourself more deeply is one of the most powerful things you can give a person. Stronger than any tutorial or coach, because it comes from within.

What it does

KiNE is a wellness tool that tracks and trains body awareness during real practice sessions. Using wearable sensor patches placed at key points on the body, it captures movement and muscle data in real time and translates it into feedback users can see, track, and act on, through a mobile app built around guided sessions, skill tracking, and progress visualization.

How we built it

We designed a full Figma prototype covering the core user flows, with a landing page, home page, onboarding, skill selection, guided sessions, and progress tracking, alongside a speculative hardware concept for the sensor patches.

Challenges we ran into

Defining exactly what to measure was harder than expected. Proprioception and kinesthetic awareness are real but invisible, and translating them into something a sensor could capture required a lot of scoping. We also struggled with how much to include; the use cases ranged from stroke recovery to surgical precision, and keeping the concept focused without losing that range was a constant tension.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The narrative arc we built, from the problem of practicing blind to the science of trainable senses to a concrete product, felt genuinely tight by the end. We're also proud of the visual design and the range of users KiNE serves, which shows the depth of the problem without feeling scattered.

What we learned

Speculative design forces you to be rigorous in a different way, you can't hide behind "we'll figure that out in engineering." Every design decision had to be grounded in a real sensory or behavioral insight. We also learned how much the framing of a problem shapes how compelling a solution feels.

What's next for KiNE

Validating the concept with real users across the three use cases: recovery, improvement, and mastery. The most immediate next step would be prototyping the sensor patch hardware and testing whether real-time haptic and audio feedback meaningfully accelerates skill acquisition in a controlled setting.