SOMA- Your Interoception Partner

Inspiration

I know a girl who forgot how to feel hungry.

She would go entire days without eating — not by choice, but because her body had gone quiet. She couldn't tell if her chest was tight from anxiety or from not eating since morning. She drank less than a litre of water a day without noticing. She cried at night not knowing why her body felt like a stranger.

That girl is me.

When I discovered interoception — the body's sense of its own internal signals — I finally had a name for what I had been living. Chronic stress and anxiety don't just affect your mind. They silence the very sense that tells you what your body needs.

I built SOMA because I needed it to exist.

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What It Does

SOMA helps users reconnect with their body's invisible signals — hunger, breath, tension, and mental load — through three connected touchpoints:

SOMA Band — a screenless wristband that silently reads four signals:

• Gut Feeling — internal tension state
• Breath Flow — rhythm and depth
• Body Temperature — linked to hunger and emotional arousal
• Mind Fullness — cognitive and emotional load

SOMA App — translates signals into warm human language. The flagship Hunger vs Anxiety Decoder tells you which state your body is actually in. Over time it builds a personal Body Dictionary — your unique signal fingerprint.

SOMA Ambient — a bedside device whose light shifts gently with your body state. No alerts. No noise. Just presence.

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How We Built It

Designed end to end in Figma using Figma Make for AI-assisted UI generation, refined through four structured UX audit rounds:

• Jargon audit — replaced every clinical term with human language
• Component audit — fixed UI elements that contradicted the concept
• Visibility audit — ensured nothing important was hidden or unclear
• Complexity audit — simplified every screen to reduce cognitive load

Safeguards were treated as a core design layer — not an afterthought.

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Challenges We Ran Into

Designing for emotional safety — every number, every color, every word carried the risk of triggering the users we were designing for. Nothing could be accidental.

Making the unfamiliar feel personal — interoception is a sense most people have never consciously heard of. Introducing it without alienating users required translating science into feeling at every single touchpoint.

Avoiding the wellness app trap — too clinical and it feels cold. Too soft and it loses credibility. SOMA had to live exactly in between.

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Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

• A three touchpoint ecosystem — band, app and ambient device — going beyond a single screen interface as the challenge intended
• The Hunger vs Anxiety Decoder — a genuinely novel feature addressing one of the most unspoken experiences of anxiety
• A fully jargon-free design language across every screen
• Crisis safeguards with India-specific mental health resources
• A design that began with the most honest possible brief: I needed this to exist

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What We Learned

The most powerful design comes from the most honest place.

What you leave out matters as much as what you put in — no calorie tracker, no punishing streaks, no alarming alerts. Every omission was intentional.

And language is a design material. The difference between "visceral tension: 84" and "your gut feeling is very elevated" is the difference between a tool that frightens you and one that holds you.

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What's Next for SOMA — Your Interoception Partner

• Clinical partnerships with college counseling centers to validate signal interpretation
• Therapist dashboard for consented data sharing in therapy sessions
• Adaptive Body Dictionary that grows more accurate over time
• SOMA for groups — extending body signal awareness to shared spaces like hostels and therapy groups

SOMA began as one student trying to hear her own body again. The next step is helping a generation do the same.

Built With

• figma
• figmamake