Vachet: Emotional Regulation App

A privacy-first emotional regulation app using calming tools, mood tracking, and AI-assisted support to help users manage stress and anxiety.

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Inspiration

Mental health support often feels inaccessible in moments when people need it most. Many existing apps feel overwhelming, clinical, expensive, or disconnected from real emotional experiences.

Vachet was created as a calm and emotionally-aware companion focused on emotional regulation, grounding, reflection, and anxiety support. The idea came from wanting to build something that feels gentle, minimal, private, and supportive rather than overly medical or productivity-driven.

The project combines emotional check-ins, grounding exercises, calming techniques, and conversational AI into a single experience designed to help users pause, regulate, and reconnect with themselves during stress, anxiety, overwhelm, or emotional spiralling.

What it does

Vachet is an iOS emotional regulation app built in SwiftUI.

The app currently includes:

  • Daily emotional check-ins
  • Mood tracking sliders
  • Symptom logging
  • Guided calming tools
  • Grounding exercises
  • Anxiety reduction techniques
  • A conversational support interface
  • Minimal calming UI designed to reduce cognitive overload

The calming tools include:

  • 4-2-6 Breathing
  • Box Breathing
  • Physiological Sigh
  • 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding
  • Muscle Release
  • Facts vs Fears reframing

The app is also being integrated with Gemma local AI models to provide emotionally-aware conversational support while preserving privacy and offline capability.

How we built it

The project was built using:

  • SwiftUI
  • Xcode
  • iOS Simulator
  • Local AI integration experimentation with Gemma
  • Raspberry Pi experimentation for edge AI deployment
  • Custom UI/UX design focused on emotional calmness and accessibility

The interface was designed with soft typography, low-stimulation colours, minimal clutter, and simple navigation to create a more emotionally comfortable experience.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was balancing emotional sensitivity with technical simplicity.

Designing an interface that feels calming without becoming visually empty required many iterations. Another challenge was integrating local AI models while maintaining performance and privacy goals.

We also explored Raspberry Pi deployment for lightweight edge AI support, which introduced networking, SSH, and deployment challenges during development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a fully functional SwiftUI emotional regulation app from scratch
  • Creating a calm and aesthetically consistent interface
  • Designing emotional regulation tools grounded in real calming techniques
  • Building an AI-assisted emotional support concept focused on privacy and accessibility
  • Successfully prototyping the architecture for local AI integration

What we learned

Through this project we learned:

  • SwiftUI app architecture
  • iOS interface design principles
  • Emotional UX design
  • Local AI model integration workflows
  • Networking and Raspberry Pi deployment basics
  • The importance of designing technology that feels emotionally humane

What's next for Vachet

Future plans include:

  • Full Gemma AI integration
  • Offline AI emotional support
  • Voice interaction
  • Wearable integration
  • Stress detection through physiological data
  • Personalized calming plans
  • Journaling and emotional insight analytics
  • Privacy-first on-device AI processing
  • Cross-platform deployment

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