Renew

Inspiration

We started with a question: what human senses are we missing that we don't even know we're missing? We can feel hunger, pain, exhaustion instantaneously. But there's one signal that has never had a sensory channel, interoception: whether our cells are aging or restoring right now. We only find out when it becomes a symptom or even worse, a disease.

What it does

Renew is a wearable ring and companion app that creates a brand new human sense, the sense of your own cellular restoration state.

The ring glows one of three colors based on continuous biometric tracking: green when your body is restoring, amber when it's working harder than it's recovering, and deep amber when sustained strain has been detected. The color is always visible on your finger.

Beyond the color, Renew enhances the signal through thermal warmth during green states, making restoration physically felt over time. And when deep amber is detected, the ring begins a slow breathing pulse, which is a haptic rhythm your nervous system can sync to, without needing the app unless the user chooses to.

The app surfaces one morning check-in, one evening reflection, and a weekly summary that reveals patterns across your days. Every three months, your biological age is recalculated, giving you a long-term measure of whether your habits are aging you or restoring you.

How we built it

We built it with Figma and used Figma Make for the breathing animation to come to life. The core app screens were built in Figma with a custom design system using Cormorant Garamond and DM Sans, a warm neutral palette, and three orb states representing the ring's color signal. The data visualization screen used custom horizontal ruler components to represent four biological pillars (metabolic load, vascular elasticity, stress toxicity, and restoration depth) in human language rather than clinical metrics

Challenges we ran into

Getting the breathing animation right took far longer than expected. The inhale and exhale text kept overlapping during transitions, and Figma Make's smart animate approach wasn't giving us the clean sequencing we needed.

Designing for a wearable ring as the primary interface was also a genuine constraint. Most wearable design patterns lean on the app as the main touchpoint. We had to keep asking ourselves: what does this feel like on the body before anyone ever opens their phone?

The balance between warmth and minimalism was a constant tension, especially when the fox companion character and the simple data visualizations. Also figuring out a cohesive storyline to tie into all the features was difficult to create.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our idea and the visual design that came long with it. Every line in the app went through multiple iterations to make sure it was suggestive, warm and honest about what the product actually does.

We were also proud of the story we created as it captured the essence of Renew so well.

Lastly, since we were all in different timezones, we were happy that we were able to collaborate so well! It was a fun learning and design experience for all of us.

What we learned

Designing a new human sense is harder than designing a new feature, especially when paired with a wearable like a ring. Every interaction, every word, and every color choice has to teach the user what this new signal means, without making the user feel overwhelmed or anxious.

We also learned that the most important design decisions in Renew are not just visual, but the restraints. For instance, not diagnosing the user or prescribing new habits to take in is something we took into consideration, in order to give the user the agency to use that information.

What's next for Renew

The biological age score is currently a proxy model based on HRV, sleep staging, skin temperature, and electrodermal activity. The next step is validating that model against longitudinal epigenetic data -specifically DNA methylation markers, which are the current gold standard for biological age measurement.

We also want to explore the thermal warmth feature more deeply. Right now it's conceptual when the ring glows green, but research into haptic feedback and temperature as emotional signal would be something we would like to work on.

Longer term, Renew has implications beyond individual wellness. Imagine a workplace that could see, in aggregate and anonymously, that its team is consistently in deep amber every product launch cycle. It would be cool to make Renew a way to identify organizational health before it's too late, and something that has not been done before.