Lumen: The AR Interface to Visualize Your Dermal Health

See your skin in 3D. Break the cycle. Healthy skin, through better habits.

Inspiration

Lumen was born from watching friends struggle with the "silent trance" of Trichotillomania and Dermatillomania. We realized these weren't just "bad habits," but subconscious, rhythmic attempts at Interoception- the body's way of grounding its nervous system during a "processing spike." By the time a user realizes they are pulling hair or picking skin, the damage to their skin is done and irreversible. Long term effects can include barrier damage, transepidermal water loss, and higher exposure to skin cancers. As tech enthusiasts, we were inspired to build a speculative "circuit breaker" that treats these impulses as a system error to be debugged rather than a failure of willpower.

What it does

Lumen is a speculative AR interface for Ray-Ban Meta glasses / AR headsets that transforms invisible stress habits like lip biting, skin picking, and hair plucking—into a real-time system audit on a 3-D map of the user's face. The platform offers an intuitive 3D visualization of real-time skin barrier health. Users can explore and identify specific tactile habits that compromise their skin and discover healthier alternative coping mechanisms to promote lasting recovery. Using inward-facing Infrared (IR) sensors, video recordings, and machine learning to learn user habits, Lumen tracks Transepidermal Water Loss (TEWL) and Myographic Stability, displaying to the user the metrics on their 3-D map, along with AI insights. Further, when the system detects a damaging trigger habit, it intervenes with a Haptic Nudge on the wearable.

How we built it

Figma Design, AR was prototyped in Shapes XR!

What we learned

We learned that chronic micro-trauma leads to permanent barrier compromise and increases long-term risks of inflammatory lesions. Skin technology is a high-impact field that will benefit from thoughtful design - interfaces like ours will encourage users to be more thoughtful about their dermal health. It will reduce skin lesions, barrier damage, and hair loss. Most importantly, we learned that the most effective way to break a habit loop affecting the skin is not to suppress it, but to Redirect the neural signal to a non-destructive haptic alternative.

What's next for Lumen: The AR Interface to Visualize Your Dermal Health

The next phase is Apple Watch Integration to create a cross-platform bio-sync. By utilizing the Taptic Engine, we can deliver "Mirror Haptics" to the wrist, leveraging proprioception and haptics on the wrist to physically pull a user's hand away from a picking site.

Built With

• figma
• shapesxr