Somasense

Inspiration

We started with one question: why do we sometimes know something is wrong before we can explain why? When we discovered that gut feeling isn't mystical, it's three measurable pre-conscious sensory systems running below awareness at all times we realised the science existed but nobody had built an interface for it. That gap became SomaSense.

What it does

SomaSense reads three pre-conscious biological signals: your internal body state, your subconscious threat detector, and your chemical radar and surfaces their combined meaning in real time. A smart ring senses continuously. A contact lens displays a single dot of light at the edge of your vision when something registers. A mobile app learns your personal signal patterns over time, building an accuracy map that shows you when your gut has been right, when it's been noise, and what the difference looks like in your body.

The result: for the first time, you can tell the difference between anxiety and genuine instinct and trust yourself with evidence to back it up.

How we built it

We built across four tracks simultaneously: product logic, hardware ecosystem, visual identity, and prototype. The ring, lens, and app were each designed for a specific context: the ring for continuous sensing, the lens for invisible real-time display, the app for learning over time. The Figma Make prototype was built from a detailed PRD covering the full user journey from onboarding through long-term accuracy mapping.

Challenges we ran into

Two challenges defined the project. The first was the passive versus active tension - users in high-stakes moments cannot interact with an app, so we had to separate the experience into layers that each ask for exactly as much attention as the user can give at that time. The second was trust - SomaSense asks people to act on signals they've spent their lives dismissing as irrational. Every design decision was made to earn that trust slowly, through evidence, not promises.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Collapsing three complex biosensory systems into a single dot of light and having it feel like enough. Building a product that lives entirely below the threshold of interruption. Every surface does its job invisibly. That restraint is hard to achieve.

We're proud that SomaSense never tells you what to decide. It surfaces what your body is detecting and steps back. The intelligence belongs to the user. And we're proud of the honesty at its core. An accuracy map that shows failures as clearly as successes. We built something whose measure of success is how little you eventually need it.

What we learned

The hardest design problem wasn't building the interface. It was knowing when to disappear. Every instinct in product design pushes toward more information, more engagement. SomaSense required the opposite. The users who need this most cannot look at a screen mid-moment. That constraint forced everything down to its minimum. A single dot of light at the edge of vision. Learning to trust that it was enough was the most important design decision we made.

We also learned that trust requires honesty about failure. An accuracy map that only shows when your signals were right is just flattery. Showing users when their gut was wrong, clearly, unflinchingly is what makes the right signals believable.

What's next for Somasense

Making the contact lens display real is the first milestone. The science exists, the consumer hardware doesn't yet. Then clinical validation. Partnering with neuroscience institutions to test whether the three-sensor combination genuinely predicts outcomes at scale.

Then expansion into high-stakes verticals: medical, legal, crisis response.

The long-term ambition is simple: a world where nobody says "I knew something was wrong but I ignored it." We're building toward that one signal at a time.