I'm a doctor and made an app that responds to breathing, for stress and anxiety

My background is as a junior surgical trainee and I started building Lungy in 2020 during the first COVID lockdown in London. During COVID, there were huge numbers of patients coming off ventilators and they are often given breathing exercises on a worksheet and disposable plastic devices called incentive spirometers to encourage deep breathing. This is intended to prevent chest infections and strengthen breathing muscles that have weakened. I noticed often the incentive spirometer would sit by the bedside, whilst the patient would be on their phone – this was the spark that lead to Lungy!

I had never coded or developed an app before but had a background in 3D design and Houdini which uses an expression language called VEX. I started to learn Swift and Metal in the evenings during lockdown and eventually, I had a good enough understanding to build a working prototype. After the first year, I won a couple of small government grants to develop Lungy further and build a small team. I managed to find some talented developers, and over 5 months (Nov 21 – Mar 22) we built the basis for Lungy as it is today.

The visuals are mostly built using Metal, with one or two using SpriteKit. There are 20 to choose from, including boids, cloth sims, fluid sims, a hacky DLA implementation, rigid body + soft body sims. The visuals change each day in the free version, and are fully unlocked in the premium version. The audio uses AudioKit with a polyphonic synth and a sequencer plays generated notes from a chosen scale (you can mess around with the sequencer and synth in Settings/Create Music!).

There are obviously lots of breathing and meditation apps out there, I wanted Lungy to be different. Rather than closing your eyes and zoning out, Lungy is about tuning into your surroundings and noticing the world around you, so all the visuals are nature inspired or have some reference to the physical world. I didn’t like that apps like Calm and Headspace require large downloads and/or a wifi connection, so Lungy’s download size is very small (<50MB), with no geometry, video or audio files.

Lungy is initially a wellness app, but I’d like to develop a medical device version for patients with breathing problems such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) & long COVID. I’m collaborating with a prof at UCL to try and complete a feasibility study next year. Thanks for reading - would love to hear feedback!