naseemakhtar994 / beatwatch

Android Wear Demo showing the heartbeat rate on a watch (tested with Moto 360) and the connected handheld.

Inspiration: We wanted to build a technology to help people improve their quality of life. Everyone deals with stress in many aspects of their daily lives; from commuting, to test taking, to giving TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon pitch presentations. By using wearable technology, our app is literally at the user's fingertips whenever they need it.

What it does: The first time the user launches the app they can choose to follow some simple step by step exercises for stress control methods, such as breathing, or meditation. After that they are able to go back to these whenever needed, as well as having access to relaxing visuals or sounds. When the user knows that they are going to be in a stressful situation they launch the app on their watch. It monitors their heart rate and when it rises above set intervals the app gently vibrates to alert the user. This enables the person to realize they are stressed and that they can help themselves with previously mentioned techniques.

At first, we struggled with developing the android app because we were unfamiliar with the wearable API. After doing a substantial amount of research, we came across some demo projects using the heart rate monitor in the Moto 360. By learning through example, we were able to craft a fully functional stress-monitoring application.

None of us had much experience developing with android tools, so we needed to learn a lot on the fly. We realized that

Accomplishments that we're proud of: pushing through the night and finishing our project.

What we learned: a lot about android development and stress relief

What's next for BeatWatch: further feature polishing, integrate adaptive algorithms to customize to the users patterns