Embedded Files
Aetonix - Lead Product Designer
Agenda
Brief Intro (5 minutes)
Product I designed from discovery through launch - Breth (15 minutes)
Work that involved a hard tradeoff or visible failure - Mobili-T (15 minutes)
Open Discussion (25 minutes)
Agenda
Brief Intro (5 minutes)
Product I designed from discovery through launch - Breth (15 minutes)
Work that involved a hard tradeoff or visible failure - Mobili-T (15 minutes)
Open Discussion (25 minutes)
Breth
Haptic Guided Breathwork & Meditation
Impact
• Lead (only) product designer, from discovery through launch (software, hardware, brand, marketing)
• Shipped from 0 → 1 in ~12 months
• Launched on Indiegogo (for early adopters/testers) + Kickstarter
• Successfully transitioned to e-commerce sales
• I led validation with testers and customers across home, classroom, and clinical contexts
The Design System
Synchronized, multi-sensory guidance
Visuals
Soft, flowing motion paths mirror the structure of each breathing pattern.
Haptics
A pair of actuators create precise, rhythmic pulses across the body.
Audio
Soundscapes, music and haptic patterns reinforce timing and emotional tone.
Flexible & Considered
Each modality - haptics, visuals, and audio - can operate independently.
This allows the experience to adapt to context:
Full guidance when learning
Minimal guidance once familiar
Fully screenless when desired
The interface supports the system, but never becomes a dependency.
Focal Point
I designed each breathing exercise to be anchored by a single glowing sphere.
It acts as a visual guide that:
Reduces cognitive load
Maintains time & pacing (no need to count)
As the sphere moves through each phase of breath, it crosses a boundary - marking the transition from inhale to hold to exhale. A shift in shadow creates a sense of direction, a quiet signal that something has changed.
Motion Language
Every breathing exercise is built on the same visual logic:
Upward movement → inhale
Horizontal → hold
Downward movement → exhale
This creates a system people can understand almost instantaneously.
Instruction & Colour
Each breathing pathway includes an interior space for written cues, reinforcing timing and instruction, especially for the more complex breathing patterns.
Each path starts neutral grey, fills with activity specific colour through inhale/hold, and recedes on exhale - visually mirroring full and empty lungs.
Motion System
Each exercise was designed to sit within a cohesive system, while remaining distinct, intuitive, and easy to recognize.
Ideation of new breathing exercises was relatively straightforward once a simple, consistent ruleset was established.
WCAG/Accessibility Considerations
• White text on near-black canvas: ~21:1. Well above the 4.5:1 body-text minimum for 2.1 AA.
• Grey secondary text (#8E8E93) on black: ~5.6:1. Passes AA.
• Coloured glows add a layer of instruction but are never the sole indicator. Every activity is also labeled in text.
• Primary buttons pair high-contrast fill with a text label, not colour alone.
• Sound design pairs with the activity and is more soothing than instructive. More descriptive audio instructions were considered for visual impairments or for individuals closing their eyes, but were not included at launch.
UI Components
Foundations
Product/Brand
Brand & Guidelines
Splash Screen
Baseline
Inex Results
Designing the Vibrations
I started drawing each haptic pattern as a scalable primitive with CTO Dylan Scott. Ensuring that patterns moved towards peak amplitude in a way that is understandable, enjoyable and not jarring.
Haptic Exploration
With Wizardry from Lead Embedded Systems Engineer (Jason Palm), a test rig with a simple UI was created.
This gave me the freedom to begin designing how the haptic vibrations should feel.
And provided me with the flexibility to begin synchronizing visuals, haptics and sounds.
Haptic Heartbeat
This expanded beyond breathing exercises, into elevated meditative experiences like a forest walk and an oasis experience.
For the heartbeat, two complementary modes were developed:
A slowing heartbeat to guide users into calm. You pick your time and the heartbeat gradually slows down throughout the experience.
A rising rhythm paired with audio to build energy and focus
Layers of Design
Designing a synchronized software/hardware experience, and a design system that included in-depth exploration of visuals, soundscapes and hapticscapes was challenging and uniquely satisfying. I got to flex my creative muscles in a variety of ways.
Usability Testing
We tested Breth through live sessions using early prototypes, gathering feedback across a wide range of users and environments.
Hardware Design
The device was designed to be minimal, wearable, and intuitive.
Form and material choices support comfort, while internal architecture enables precise, high-fidelity haptic feedback (and repairability).
Motion & Marketing
Breth (unfortunately) is a product that is not fully understood until you experience it in person.
I bridged this gap through motion within the product's visuals and throughout marketing.
Packaging
Packaging was treated as part of the system.
A calm, minimal exterior opens to reveal vibrant internal patterns - reflecting the shift from stillness to energy that defines the product itself.
Deeply Involved
From discovery, to prototype, to launch, I was deeply involved in the realities of bringing Breth to market - including assembly, packaging, and fulfillment.
This reinforced the importance of designing not just the product, but the system required to deliver it.
Following our soft launch and crowd source launches, Breth transitioned into an e-commerce model, continuing to evolve through real-world use. Which included partnerships with yoga studios that synced multiple devices to an instructor's device and schools (for sensory rooms).
Key Learnings
Navigating complexity is awesome and something I love.
Product discovery is something that fuels my curiosity and process.
Design is not linear. Trying to stick to ideal process ≠ ideal outcomes. Plan. But it helps to be fluid.
Messiness and chaos are managed through communication. Even when it's uncomfortable.
Everything is manageable when you're working with people you trust (and genuinely like).
Accessibility considerations need to be established at the outset to ensure inclusivity and scalability.
Things I would do differently
Figma's annotations aren't great. I would now use CVS Health's Web Accessibility Annotation Plugin Kit from the outset - especially when designing for more complex platforms that require in-depth accessibility considerations.
Current resources through Claude Code MCP integrations (ex. skills that check WCAG AA 2.1 standards), Mobbin integration (for UI/UX inspiration) and Figma UI Kits (like Google's Material Kit) drastically alter the speed and communication capabilities for product ideation.
Designing a three-tiered visual design system (brand/alias/mapped structure) from the outset is something I would likely employ for complex design systems. It seems to lend itself to improved communication and scalability.
Dipping my toe into the global wellness market was enjoyable, but I am more excited to potentially work on clinical contexts like Continuous Chronic Care Management. Similar to Mobili-T.
Agenda
Brief Intro (5 minutes)
Product I designed from discovery through launch - Breth (15 minutes)
Work that involved a hard tradeoff or visible failure - Mobili-T (15 minutes)
Open Discussion (25 minutes)
Mobili-T
Portable Therapy for Head & Neck Cancer
Impact
Enabled real-time insights for clinicians across 50+ healthcare organizations including Stanford, Harvard, Cleveland Clinic, and UCLA Health
Improved accuracy & adherence for at-home and in-clinic therapy for 1000s of patients
Contributed to raising $4M+ in funding
3 patents in digital therapy systems
Core77 Design Awards - Research & Strategy + Community Choice
Named NACO (National Angel Capital Organization) Startup of the Year (2021)
Co-author on numerous scientific publications
Role & Scope
Role: Product Design Lead
Led 0→1 design of a connected therapy platform across mobile, hardware, and clinician tools - from early research through clinical deployment.
Defined product strategy and core experience principles
Designed patient and clinician workflows across mobile and web
Established onboarding and adherence models
Aligned product with engineering, clinical, and research teams
The Problem
Swallowing therapy breaks down outside the clinic.
Patients lack clear feedback on whether they’re doing exercises correctly, and clinicians lose visibility into progress between sessions.
Traditional systems:
Are tied to specialized, clinic-based equipment
Not usable in everyday environments
Require supervision to be effective
Result
Low adherence, inconsistent practice, and limited clinical insight.
Rethinking Therapy
By combining a wearable sensor with a mobile platform, we aimed to:
Bring clinically validated therapy into everyday environments
Provide real-time biofeedback that patients can understand and act on
Enable clinicians to monitor progress remotely
The goal was not just to digitize therapy, but to create a system that supports consistent, real-world use.
Early Direction & Reframing
Early in R&D, an external studio was engaged to prototype concepts for grant applications. Based on superficial demographic assumptions (primarily older, male patients), they re-skinned an existing fishing game into a proposed therapy experience called Hook, Line & Swallow.
Listening to Lived Experiences
For individuals living with head and neck cancer, swallowing is not a neutral act - it is often a negotiation with discomfort, aspiration risk, and psychological distress. Even small sips of water can trigger fear responses, despite being medically necessary due to treatment-related side effects such as dry mouth caused by damaged salivary glands.
Patients didn’t need motivation - they needed clarity
Swallowing therapy is physically and cognitively demanding. Early concepts focused on gamification - but interviews revealed a different need.
Patients needed to understand:
What to do
Whether they were doing it correctly
How close they were to success
Decision: Remove gamification entirely
Why: It increased anxiety (failure felt punitive) and conflicted with clinical expectations
Impact: Improved trust, reduced friction, and supported consistent adherence
Details Matter
This led to a deliberate simplification of the experience. Complex clinical instructions were translated into progressively disclosed guidance, allowing users to build understanding over time rather than all at once.
Visual Language
I introduced a simple visual system where each swallow, similar to a rep in traditional exercise plans, is represented as a cube.
This translated complex physiological data into something instantly understandable - while remaining clinically meaningful.
This reframed therapy from “win/lose” → “understand and improve.”
Each swallow is represented by a coloured cube, corresponding to different exercise types
Each rep of a swallowing exercise has an outcome: nothing detected, goal attempted and goal reached
A dotted goal line is generated during calibration. This becomes the goal during exercise. Different exercises have different time or intensity goals.
The Regular swallow is like a warm-up - used to calibrate the goal for other exercises.
The Effortful swallow involves squeezing neck and throat muscles as hard as possible
The Held swallow involves holding the larynx (Adam’s apple) at its highest point for 3-5 seconds during a swallow
Decision: Use an understandalbe rep based system of communicating exercises
Why: Reduce interpretation gaps between home and clinic
Impact: Faster understanding for patients, clearer communication for clinicians
Clinicians lost visibility between sessions → we rebuilt it with a real-time portal
At-home therapy introduced a critical gap: clinicians lost visibility into patient performance between sessions.
The Clinician Portal restores clinical visibility.
It enables:
Real-time tracking of adherence and progress
Pattern recognition across sessions
Remote adjustment of therapy plans
By sharing a visual language with the patient app, it creates a consistent, interpretable system across both sides of care.
This shifted MobilI-T from just a patient tool into a connected care platform - supporting better decisions without increasing clinician burden.
Patients can see can insights through in-app tracking
Clinicians have access to insights on their Clinician Portal
Changes to the workout can be made in the Portal and patients will be notified of alterations
Clinician Portal
The Clinician Portal was designed to support both individual practitioners and larger clinics - providing a centralized way to manage patient care at scale. Clinicians can access patient profiles, review performance data, and quickly identify patterns of progress or areas where additional support may be needed. And it shares a similar visual language to the patient app for continuity of communication.
Decision: Centralize patient data into a real-time clinician dashboard
Why: Clinicians lacked visibility between sessions
Impact: Earlier intervention, more responsive care, reduced clinic dependency
Designed for Real-World Adoption
Deploying into clinical environments required more than a usable product. It required alignment across patients, clinicians, and administrators.
We designed onboarding as part of the system:
Structured training for clinicians and care teams
Clear documentation and protocols for setup and use
Live support to guide early adoption and integration into workflows
This ensured teams could confidently introduce Mobili-T into practice, without adding friction to already complex clinical environments.
Patient Onboarding
Required communicating precise anatomical placement and unfamiliar interactions.
I simplified:
Visual representations of the body
Instructions and language
Interaction flows
This ensured the system remained usable across varying patient conditions and abilities.
Decision: Design onboarding as a core part of the product system. Not a handoff after delivery.
Why: Clinical adoption depends on more than usability. Teams need clarity, trust, and support to integrate new tools into established workflows.
Impact: Faster onboarding across clinics, higher confidence and consistency in use, reduced friction for both clinicians and patients
Live Clinical Use
Through clinician interviews and usability testing, clinicians emphasized the need to observe patients outside rigid exercise flows.
In response, we designed Core - a flexible biofeedback mode for in-clinic use with no predefined structure or tracking.
Core is a sandbox-style biofeedback interface that allows clinicians to live stream muscle activity from Mobili-T’s sensors, zoom in on the biofeedback, and visually scroll through the session's history.
Core enhances in-clinic utility and strengthens the transition to structured therapy at home.
Decision: Add a non-structured “Core” mode for clinicians
Why: Prescribed flows didn’t reflect real clinical interaction
Impact: Increased adoption and usefulness during live sessions
But it was bumpy...
Key Learnings
Providing clarity and joy to people in challenging situations is deeply rewarding.
It's essential to continually learn from the people using your product.
It is critical for you, and your team to use your product. It builds empathy and quality.
Behavioural design principles are an important lens. Especially with daily, or repeated use products.
Things I would do differently
Early external concepts weren't based on lived experiences. I now push to get real users involved as early as possible.
Test the business model as aggressively as the product. We spent a lot of time designing for D2C without validating who would actually buy it.
More time observing/learning behaviour early. We treated the clinical gold standard as the product instead of understanding how therapy actually happens.
I'd work much earlier to create alignment across leadership, product, sales, marketing, and engineering around who we're serving and why they'll buy.
Real-World Impact
Mobili-T helped patients bring therapy into everyday life - making consistent progress outside the clinic possible.
“There is another device at the Cross Cancer Institute, but it’s about the size of a refrigerator, so you can’t take it home. I was able to take Mobili-T to my office and do my exercises while sitting at my desk. It’s amazing.”
“After three weeks I started to get better. I was able to have Christmas dinner—I had turkey and mashed potatoes because of Mobili-T.”
— Ted, Clinical Trial Participant
"I practically had to pry the Mobili-T out of my patient’s hands when she finished her treatment course. She had a really favorable experience with it and made substantial gains in normalizing her oral diet. The part I like best about Mobili-T is that it's easy to use and meaningful to the patients who use it. As a clinician, I no longer have to wonder how much exercise my patients are doing at home. The clinician portal opens that door for me and adds a whole lot of accountability to the patient's program."
— Heather, Clinician
Agenda
Brief Intro (5 minutes)
Product I designed from discovery through launch - Breth (15 minutes)
Work that involved a hard tradeoff or visible failure - Mobili-T (15 minutes)
Open Discussion (25 minutes)
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