Embedded Files
Brethwork
Overview
Brethwork builds on a simple challenge: while breathing exercises are widely understood to support stress regulation and focus, they’re often difficult to follow, remember, and maintain in practice.
I researched existing breathing exercises, and transformed them into experiences for breth that feel intuitive, understandable, and genuinely enjoyable to use. Rather than relying on timers or mental counting, the goal was to create a system that guides users effortlessly; reducing cognitive load while supporting consistency. Whether used with the haptic vibrations from breth's wearable, or simply as visual guidance in-app, the goal was to reduce complexity and increase user focus.
The experience is built around three synchronized forms of guidance: visuals, audio, and haptic vibrations. After performing a breathing baseline to analyze your breathing capabilities, each form of guidance synchronizes to reinforce the rhythm of your breath. One of my goals was to ensure each form of guidance could also function independently depending on user preference and context. Together, they create a flexible, multi-sensory system that helps users stay present, whether they’re looking for calm, focus, or a reset.
A glowing sphere anchors every exercise. Providing a simple, recognizable focal point that’s easy to follow across different breathing patterns.
Each breathing pathway includes an interior space for written cues, reinforcing timing and instruction without interrupting the flow of the experience.
Exercises follow a ruleset - upwards movement for inhales, horizontal for holds, and downwards for exhales.
Guiding the shift
As the sphere moves through each phase of breath, it gently crosses a boundary - marking the transition from inhale to hold to exhale. A subtle shift in shadow creates a sense of direction, a quiet signal that something has changed.
Paired with synchronized haptics and sound, this moment becomes more than visual. It’s felt, heard, and seen all at once. Guiding without needing to think.
Each exercise has a glowing sphere as a guide. Easy to follow and recognizable throughout the product.
Exercises follow a ruleset - upwards movement for inhales, horizontal for holds, and downwards for exhales.
When transitioning between phases, the sphere passes over a barrier. I created a visual transition that is both elegant and understandable.
Box Breathing
Box breathing is a form of controlled breathwork that involves four equal steps: inhaling, holding the breath, exhaling, and holding again. This creates a square, or box-like pattern.
This was the first exercise I designed
Box Breathing
Breth began as a strategic expansion beyond clinical rehabilitation into a broader, consumer-facing space. While breathing exercises are widely used in clinical settings and offer well-established benefits, much of the consumer landscape felt fragmented, often lacking clarity and consistency.
Building on our team's expertise in dysphagia and respiratory health, we saw an opportunity to reframe breathwork through a more grounded, evidence-informed approach. There are no instant resets for the nervous system; wellness is built through consistent practice, not quick fixes. Our goal was to create an experience that felt intuitive, credible, and engaging. Bridging clinical insight with an immersive, sensory product that encourages consistency and supports everyday improvements in focus and stress.
I led product design through research, ideation, MVP development and commercialization, helping shape a system that combines wearable haptics, software, and intelligent breathing detection. Along the way, we developed and tested core technologies, filed foundational IP, and validated the concept with both users and clinicians.
To further test the market and reach a wider audience, we successfully launched breth on Indiegogo and later, Kickstarter. We leveraged crowdfunding to generate early demand, build community, and validate the product beyond traditional healthcare channels.
Breth continued as a successful e-commerce product, building a loyal customer base before concluding with the closure of True Angle Medical Technologies.
Key Achievements
Conceptualized, designed, and shipped a new product from 0→1 in ~12 months
Led end-to-end product design and creative direction across hardware, software, and brand experience
Working within a lean development team, I helped design and validate an MVP, that included respiratory detection, haptic interactions, and foundational IP.
Successfully launched and shipped on Indiegogo and Kickstarter, building an early adopter community
Transitioned to direct-to-consumer e-commerce following crowdfunding, generating continued sales and engagement
Short examples of breth’s guided breathing exercises. Removing the need to count and making each pattern easy to follow.
Guided Breathing
Breth was designed to make breathwork practices more understandable, and genuinely enjoyable to use. By synchronizing haptic vibrations, audio, and visuals, the experience creates a physical focal point that supports stress relief and sustained attention.
I designed the guided breathing system to be intuitive at a glance. A glowing orb moves along a defined pathway: rising for inhales, descending for exhales, and traveling horizontally during holds. Written cues sit within the path, while the length of each segment visually represents timing. Transitions between inhale, hold, and exhale are clearly marked as the orb crosses a boundary, reinforcing each shift without requiring conscious effort. And the haptic vibrations make it so that you can close your eyes and still enjoy guidance without the cognitive load.
Haptics, Audio, Visuals
Alongside guided breathing exercises, I designed a series of multi-sensory experiences that combine haptics, audio, and visuals to support stress relief, focus, and energy.
Breth uses a pair of actuators to deliver high-fidelity vibrations to the top and bottom of the device, creating clear, intuitive physical cues that guide each inhale, hold, and exhale. These haptic signals are synchronized with audio and visual elements, reinforcing rhythm and helping users stay present in the experience.
Heart Rise is one example. I designed a heartbeat-inspired soundscape, paired with synchronized haptic feedback, that gradually slows over time to influence your sense of calm.
Breth's haptic vibrations, audio and visuals are all synchronized, for a uniquely understandable, and enjoyable, stress relief experience.
An open wordmark echoes the movement of breath, while the form subtly references the device itself.
The breth brand
The brand is grounded in clarity and trust. In a space often shaped by vague claims, breth emphasizes research, thoughtful engineering, and intentional design - presenting the benefits of breathwork in a way that is both credible and easy to understand.
This philosophy extends into the identity system. The wordmark is open and fluid, reflecting the natural rhythm of breath, while soft forms suggest approachability.
Haptics are a defining element of the experience, and this is echoed throughout the visual language - reinforcing the physical, sensory nature of the product.
The ‘b’ in the breth wordmark echoes the contour of the worn device, subtly integrating the location of the power button and one of the haptic points. Connecting the identity directly to the physical product.
The brand mark is derived from the ‘b’, rotated to suggest forward-moving breath. It’s used sparingly, primarily in small or secondary contexts like a favicon, to ensure the wordmark remains the primary expression of the brand.
The brand mark extends into the app experience as an animated timer, used during baseline measurements to guide and visualize breathing patterns, functioning as a more precise, interactive evolution of tests like CO₂ tolerance.
Haptic feedback is central to the breth experience. I developed a visual language that expresses these vibrations, translating an invisible, physical sensation into a recognizable and consistent design element across the product.
Packaging
I explored packaging approaches inspired by brands like Apple, Nest, and Nintendo - where unboxing is treated as part of the product experience, not just a container.
While we didn’t have the budget for highly engineered, custom packaging, Dylan Scott and I focused on creating something intentional and memorable, within our constraints. The exterior is clean and understated, designed to feel calm and considered. As it opens, the interior shifts to something more vibrant and colourful (even though it's the same pattern), revealing the energy of the product.
These patterns reinforce breth’s haptic experience, visually echoing the rhythm and sensation that define the product itself.
The exterior and interior mirror each other, but provide a colourful surprise when the package is opened.
The exterior and interior mirror each other, but provide a colourful surprise when the package is opened.
Instructions
The breth user guide was designed as an extension of the product experience - prioritizing clarity, consistency, and long-term usability. I translated complex hardware, software, and regulatory information into language that feels approachable and easy to follow, whether setting up the device for the first time or returning to it later.
The structure and visual system were intentionally designed to be evergreen. Clear hierarchy, consistent iconography, and modular layouts support intuitive navigation while allowing the guide to evolve alongside the product without losing coherence.
Overall, the goal was to create documentation that feels as considered as the product itself. Clear, reliable, and built to support users over time.
The user guide can be read here.
Research
Starting from zero, I led a multi-layered research process, combining trend analysis, stakeholder and customer interviews, and hands-on testing, including VO₂ max and fitness benchmarking, to understand potential avenues for breath training or measurement. These insights were translated into opportunity areas, decision frameworks, and design questions that guided the team from broad exploration to focused concept development.
I conducted trend analysis alongside stakeholder and prospective customer interviews. I synthesized these insights into clearly defined opportunity areas aligned with our team’s strengths and capabilities.
I developed a decision-making matrix to translate early research into actionable criteria - evaluating market fit, feasibility, team alignment, and speed to market. This helped the team and advisors quickly understand trade-offs and prioritize opportunities.
I mapped both direct and analogous competitors against our prioritized opportunities, using Business Model Canvases to deepen understanding of market dynamics, positioning, and potential gaps.
I translated research insights into a focused set of design questions, which guided a series of synchronous and asynchronous design sprints. I led these efforts to rapidly explore and converge on a short list of high-potential concepts.
Ideation
Following a series of design sprints, I synthesized research into a set of early adopter profiles, identifying key traits, motivations, and behaviors that would shape the product’s direction.
From there, I explored a range of concepts across both hardware and software, translating early ideas into tangible product directions. This included shaping UX/UI, defining how the device would guide breathing in real time, and considering how the physical form would support comfort, clarity, and ease of use.
In parallel, I designed the product name and brand identity, grounding it in the same principles uncovered through research - calm, clarity, and trust.
Prototyping
Working with CTO Dylan Scott and Lead Embedded Systems Engineer Jason Palm, we spent several months developing early physical prototypes through 3D modeling, printing, and hardware experimentation, while concurrently designing the app UX/UI.
I contributed to protocol design and testing for breathing data capture. The data gathered during this phase informed the detection algorithm developed by Data Scientist Shide Qiu, being able to distinguish between inhales, holds, and exhales, while filtering out non-relevant events like coughs and swallows.
Validation - first public demonstration
With our first set of working prototypes in hand, we hosted a soft launch to test the integrated hardware and software and gather early feedback. I designed a series of interactive stations to keep guests engaged, gather structured feedback, and manage the flow of participants testing our limited number of prototypes.
Guests were invited to share what causes them stress, and how they seek relief, using an open-ended sticky note wall. This created a playful set of personal experiences leading to more conversations between the team and attendees.
We presented a range of colour combinations for the device and invited attendees to vote on their preferences. This helped us understand aesthetic expectations and identify directions.
A dedicated room showcased sketches, early prototypes, and design sprint storyboards, giving guests a transparent view into how breth evolved from idea to working concept.
Two private rooms were set up away from the main crowd, allowing participants to try breth in a more controlled environment with noise-canceling headphones and minimal distractions, allowing us to gather deeper feedback.
Delivery
As the product moved toward launch, I was closely involved in the hands-on realities of assembly, packaging, and fulfillment. Working alongside the team, we assembled units, prepared packaging, and coordinated shipments to ensure everything was ready for delivery.
We successfully fulfilled all Kickstarter orders on time - an important milestone that validated both the product and the process behind it. Following this, we transitioned into a direct-to-consumer e-commerce model, continuing to refine operations while delivering breth to a broader audience.
Breth reflects my involvement across software, hardware, and the end-to-end effort required to bring a startup product into the world. You can read more details below.
Read more about breth's UX/UI design
Read more about breth's haptic hearbeat design
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