[Tool]
[My Role]
Design lead — app, core screens, system
[Partners]
Li · Ning · Liu · Mj
[Time line]
48 hours ·
Config 2026
Problem Statement
01
02
03
NExO detects the airborne chemistry of emotion and turns it into something you can perceive — a gentle signal in the moment, and a legible record over time. It doesn't tell you to calm down. It confirms what your body already sensed: you're not imagining it — this space really is tense right now.
NExO detects the airborne chemistry of emotion and turns it into something you can perceive — a gentle signal in the moment, and a legible record over time. It doesn't tell you to calm down. It confirms what your body already sensed: you're not imagining it — this space really is tense right now.
HOW IT WORKS
A new sensory channel, where smell already lives.
Your body already detects the emotional chemistry of people nearby. NExO surfaces it in three moves — then hands it to a sense you can consciously read.
01
Detect
A micro e-Nose captures the volatile compounds bodies release under stress, fear, and joy.
02
Analyze
An on-device model reads emotional signatures from the molecular combinations.
03
Translate
Signals become gentle scent rhythms on the nose — legible without a screen.
1
Sense
Nose clip reads two streams — your skin, and the air around you.
→
2
Interpret
On-device model reads the emotional signature, privately.
→
3
Feed back
Scent to feel the room now; app to
see & reflect.
→
4
You adjust
You notice, move, breathe — it keeps learning your patterns.
↺ back to 1 — each pass makes the next one sharper. Continuous awareness, not a one-way readout.
01 / 04
LIVE SCENE · HOME
Read the room in real time.
The home screen leads with the atmosphere itself — the crowd rendered in emotion color — and puts numbers second. The decisive call: separating the room's stress from your own.
ROOM · SOCIAL
9
YOU · SELF
27
02 / 04
CALIBRATION · TRUST
The device learns you.
An emotion sensor that doesn't know you is just a mood ring. Calibration is an ongoing loop — Measure, Explore, Confirm, Improve — where your feedback visibly shapes the model. Trust is the product.
SCREEN DATA (93% · 217 DAYS) IS ILLUSTRATIVE OF A MATURE USAGE STATE.
03 / 04
MEMORY · PATTERNS
Moments become a map.
One reading tells you about now; Memory tells you about your life. A daily timeline logs each place with its detected mood, and the monthly view rolls it into an emotion breakdown and top locations.
settings.png
04 / 04
SETTINGS · CONTROL
Privacy, in plain reach.
On-device storage by default. Location tracking as a visible toggle. Delete-all-data in the main list — not buried three menus deep. In a 48-hour sprint the quiet screens get skipped first; we made them load-bearing.
IN THE POCKET
Quiet enough to live with.
NExO sits among the apps you already use — no dashboard to babysit, no notifications begging for attention. It waits until you want to look.
DESIGN SYSTEM
The interface stays monochrome and precise, set in Recursive. Color enters in exactly one place — the emotion taxonomy — so a hue always carries meaning.
Calm
Pleasant · low
Joy
Pleasant · high
Anxious
Unpleasant · rising
Angry
Unpleasant · hot
WHAT I LEARNED
The visualization was the easy part.
Trust first
Designing a new sense means designing trust before anything else. The calibration loop, the confirmations, the accuracy stat — all of it is trust infrastructure. The pretty part comes after.
Validation is a feature
Our biggest insight wasn't technical. The need wasn't ‘reduce my stress’ — it was ‘confirm my perception.’ Reframing from regulation to confirmation is what made the architecture click.
Alerts shouldn't cause stress
A tool that flags tension can't add to it. Every notification was tuned to inform without intruding — the calmest possible way to say ‘the room just shifted.’
IF WE HAD ANOTHER WEEK
The honest gaps.
01
Prototype the scent vocabulary itself. What an ‘anxious room’ feels like as a rhythm on the nose is still notional — and that's the actual new sense.
02
Test the bystander question. We protected the wearer's privacy. How people feel about being sensed is the harder problem, barely started.
03
Stress-test the taxonomy. Four emotions was right for 48 hours. Real rooms are messier than calm, joy, anxious, angry.
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