TEAM PAK : Felt

Inspiration

I volunteer at a prosthetics research lab where I was a study participant testing EMG sensors. The study involved repeatedly contracting my muscles and completing tasks in a virtual environment while the sensors read my signals. At some point during the session my signals kept weakening and I kept failing the tasks. I didn't feel fatigued. I didn't feel anything obviously wrong. Then, without thinking, I started humming quietly in my head m just something to calm myself down. And my signals came back. I completed the task.

That moment stayed with me. I had accidentally regulated my nervous system without knowing it , and my body responded physically.

I started wondering, what happens to someone who has actually lost a limb? Someone learning to use a myoelectric prosthetic for the first time, frustrated that the hand keeps misfiring, with no way to understand why. The frustration degrades the signal. The degraded signal causes more failures. The failure causes more frustration. Nearly half of advanced prosthetic users abandon their devices within the first year.

What it does

Felt introduces a new sense , neuromuscular signal clarity. For the first time, prosthetic users can consciously perceive the quality of the communication between their nervous system and their device, in real time.

A wristband worn on the residual limb reads EMG signal quality continuously. A companion app visualizes that signal as a living waveform , large and blue when the user is calm, compressing and warming to amber as tension builds. No clinical charts. No percentages. Just a visual that breathes with the body.

When signal quality drops, the band delivers a gentle pulse. The user activates regulation through breathwork, calming sound, or grounding vibration, without touching their phone. After each session, Felt shows exactly when the signal dropped, what brought it back, and which method worked fastest. Session data can be shared with a prosthetist, transforming vague appointments into precise calibration based on real nervous system patterns.

How we built it

We built Felt using Figma and Figma Makeover one weekend. The design system was built around colour psychology research m amber for calm states, icy blue for a strong signal, deep navy backgrounds to reduce cognitive load for users already under stress. Every design decision was tied back to the user's emotional and physiological state. One-handed accessibility was a core constraint throughout, all primary actions are reachable in the bottom third of the screen, with voice commands as an alternative to every tap.

Figma Make was used to build the interactive signal visualization and breathing regulation screens, allowing us to prototype the core sensory experience of the app rather than just Its visual layout.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest design problem was the live signal view. We went through multiple iterations trying to communicate signal quality without numbers, without clinical language, and without anything That felt alarming. The Colour logic had to feel intuitive without any Explanation: Warm means your body needs Attention, cool means everything is working.

Accessibility was also a genuine constraint. Designing for someone with one hand meant rethinking every interaction from scratch.

As a team of beginners in Figma, there was also a real learning curve in getting comfortable with the tools , but that challenge pushed us to be more intentional about every decision we made.

Accomplishments we're proud of

The way the app came together in the end. The flow and the additional ideas we were able to think of, like the prosthetist channel. It started as a supporting feature, but became one of the most meaningful parts of the Product. The idea was that a person's struggle doesn't have to be invisible to the people trying to help them.

We're also proud of the safeguards. It would have been easy to skip the privacy and consent design , but for a tool that reads biometric data from vulnerable users in rehabilitation, that work is not optional. Data never leaves the device without explicit per-share consent. The app tracks unassisted sessions and celebrates them , because the goal is to make itself unnecessary.

What we learned

We learned that speculative design is most powerful when it's rooted in a real, specific human moment. We also learned how much thinking goes into a product Design. For most of us, this was our first real experience designing a product from concept to prototype, and it genuinely changed how we think about building things for people.

What's next

This project was always more than a hackathon Submission. This weekend gave it a foundation. We plan on learning more through research and hopefully make it a product.