Steady - you deserve to move without fear.

Inspiration

One in four adults over 65 falls every year. Almost all of them had weeks of warning signs their body couldn't interpret and their doctors couldn't see. We wanted to build something that made the invisible visible - not after the fall, but long before it. The deeper we researched, the more we realized balance isn't one sense. It's five, all degrading silently, all measurable if you know where to look.

What it does

Steady surfaces five physiological senses that govern balance - vestibular, proprioceptive, interoceptive, chronoceptive, and cerebellar processing - through a live interface called the Orb. It runs a daily 90-second check-in, tracks gait and sway passively throughout the day, and delivers a personalized exercise plan that updates weekly based on your data. Two optional paired devices extend the sensing surface: AURA glasses that add vestibular and head-position data through a bridge-mounted IMU and bone conduction nodes, and TERRA shoe clips that map 256 pressure points across the foot 500 times per second. A Circle feature connects users to family members and caregivers with privacy controls set entirely by the primary user. A one-tap clinician report exports structured balance data for doctor appointments.

How we built it

We built Steady in Figma, using Figma Make to prototype the core interactive experience - particularly the Balance Orb, which renders a live center-of-gravity visualization driven by device sensor input. The full user flow, from onboarding through daily check-in through the Circle caregiver feature, was designed across 75 screens. The personalization layer uses AI to interpret onboarding health data and tailor the experience from day one.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest design problem was information without overwhelm. Balance data is continuous, multi-dimensional, and deeply personal - the temptation is to show all of it. We kept stripping back until we had one primary interface that anyone could understand in under three seconds. The Orb went through a dozen iterations before it felt right. The second challenge was the dual-user model: designing something that genuinely centers the tracked person's dignity while still being useful to the people who love them. Those two things are in tension and we had to make a hundred small decisions to keep the balance right.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The science grounding. Every sensing claim in Steady maps to real neuroscience - the basal ganglia's role in gait automaticity, the clinical validation of heel-to-toe transfer timing as a fall predictor, the research on rhythmic auditory stimulation for Parkinson's gait freezing. We didn't invent new senses. We built an interface for senses that already exist and already matter, and we did it in a way that respects the people who need it most.

What we learned

That the most important design decisions aren't visual. They're about what you don't surface, when you don't send the alert, and how you frame a number so it motivates instead of frightens. Designing for older adults forced us to question every assumption we had about what "intuitive" means. And designing for multiple user types simultaneously - Eleanor, Marcus, Maya - made us build something more honest and more durable than if we'd designed for just one.

What's next for Steady - you deserve to move without fear.

Clinical validation partnerships with physical therapy practices to test the 30-day clinician report in real appointments. Integration with Apple Health and Google Fit for sleep and activity correlation data. A research partnership to validate the head-to-foot latency measurement against existing clinical tools. And the two devices - AURA and TERRA - moving from concept into hardware development. The phone is the beginning. The full sensing system is where Steady becomes something that has never existed before.