FocusField

Imagine a space where you have complete focus, entering flow-state is easy, and productivity skyrockets. That's FocusField. FocusField creates a distraction-free forcefield around you for deep work.

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Inspiration

We often get distracted ourself when trying to study when theres so many distractions around us. You can often check a notifcation only to end up doomscrolling for an hour and wasting time. There are phone locking and screen time apps that can help hwoever htey all fall short in that theyre easy to overide, and get in the way when you do actualy need to use your phone. We need a way to lock out distractions when we're studying, but still be able to use our phone freely.

What it does

FocusField creates a "forcefield" around the device, within this forcefield your phone is locked and cannot be used. As soon as you leave the forcefield though you can use your phone like normal. What FocusField allows you to do is define areas such as a study, desk or room where you need ultimate focus and distractions must be locked out. If you really need to check your phone, and are unable to leave the forcfield, then you can turn the device over to get a 5 minute window of access, the device will re-enable the forcfield after 5 minutes though.

How we built it

There are many large technical challenges we faced while devloping this. The biggest being how will we accurately determine the distance of the phone to the FocusField hub, and secondly how would we reliably lock the phone. We came up with a unique and inovative solution to determine the distance of a phone from the hub, using the signal power level (RSSI signal stength) of a BLE (Bluetooth-low-energy) conection. But this also posed an issue as having to pair a device to the FocusField hub defeats the point of it. Instead we turned the FocusField hub into a BLE beacon, so devices don't even nead to pair to it. The app just detects the beacons signal and can determine whether the phone is inside the forcefield or not. The second problem was simple to solve but complicated the project, we could use the phone accessibility servaces to lock the phone, however this required to write native Kotlin code for android, instead of using an intuitive framework like Flutter or React Native.

The FocusField hub consists of an arduino, acceleromiter, display, and the required electronics and circuitry to run and power them all. The device can be battery powered for use on the go, or plugges into a wall socket to be easily setup once and left no hastle. The acceleromiter is used to detect when the device is flipped allowing a break in the forcefield.

Challenges we ran into

One of the major challenges we faced was getting an acurate reading of the phones distance from the FocusField hub, we tried various methods some of which worked better than others. Are final descision to use BLE and RSSI is an interesting way to use existing techonology applying it somewhere it is rarely used but works well. Hardware also brought many issues, we wanted the device to be both portable and fixed, meaning it had to be powerable by both a wall outlet and a battery. Fitting all the components into the batteries power limmit was challenging and we had to be tactical to which compenets we used and how,

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our final product exeeded our expectations, it works flawlessly withi a good UI/UX, easy to use hub, no install or faffing. The project is almostready to actualy be sold as a real product. We successfully was able to create the force field, enforce the phone locking, fit the device itno power requriements, and make an appealing mobile up.

What we learned

We learned that hardware + mobile development is exponentially harder than either alone.

Small decisions compound fast: choosing native Android over Flutter changed timelines, BLE signal behaviour dictated UX constraints, and power requirements shaped the entire hardware design.

We also learned how fragile “simple ideas” become when they meet reality. Distance isn’t just distance, it’s radio physics. Locking a phone isn’t just a button, it’s permissions, services, edge cases, and user trust. On the product side, we learned that enforcement must be balanced with agency. The 5-minute flip override wasn’t just a feature — it was essential for usability. Pure restriction doesn’t work; controlled escape valves do.

Technically, we gained hands-on experience with: BLE beaconing and RSSI filtering Native Android Accessibility APIs Arduino hardware integration Accelerometer gesture detection Designing systems that span physical and digital domains

What's next for FocusField

Next, we want to move from prototype to product.

On the hardware side, we plan to design our own custom circuit boards. This will let us prioritise Bluetooth stability, dramatically reduce the size of the hub, improve power efficiency, and turn what is currently a functional prototype into something that feels truly consumer-ready.

On the software side, we want to bring FocusField to iOS so the system isn’t limited to Android users. Alongside that, we’ll continue refining RSSI filtering, improving proximity accuracy, and polishing the app UI into something cleaner, more minimal, and more delightful to use.

We also want to expand the ecosystem: support multiple hubs per user, allow configurable forcefield strength and schedules, and improve handling of essential apps (calls, navigation, emergency access).

Most importantly, we’re incredibly interested in launching FocusField as a real product for real users. This isn’t just a hackathon experiment — we see genuine potential here. Long term, FocusField could evolve into a physical productivity platform for homes, libraries, schools, and coworking spaces, where focus becomes an environmental property rather than something you have to constantly fight for with willpower alone.

The goal is simple but bold: make deep focus effortless by embedding it into the physical world.

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