Show HN: Smartphone haptics for inducing calm, an alternative to meditation | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Smartphone haptics for inducing calm, an alternative to meditation

getharbor.app

14 pointspedalpete20 comments

Hey HN,

We've been working in neurotech over the past few years, primarily focusing on improving sleep. A friend asked if I would build her a vagal nerve stimulation device. These are devices used to improve relaxation, and “vagal tone”. She didn't want to shell out hundreds for the existing solutions.

I originally said no, but then I thought, what if we leveraged smartphone haptics to achieve the same effect as these expensive devices?

After some tinkering, Harbor: Immersive Calm was published to the app store last week.

https://getharbor.app

It’s pretty basic and very MVP, no logins, just:

1)open the app

2) select an immersion (mix of sound and haptics)

3) select how long you want to be immersed (?)

4) lay back, put your phone on your chest, and feel the sensations.

In comparison to meditation, with Harbor, there is no “doing it right”, : Lay back, Tune In & Chill Out.

I initially built for Android, but the fine-grained control and consistency of haptic motors in iOS device is a better experience. Though, I’m not ruling out a future dive into Android.

Here’s a video demo(https://youtu.be/gr70kY9_Abk) for a sneak peek. Though, without the haptic feedback, you can’t really get a feeling for the experience.

Compared to devices the cost hundreds of dollars plus subscriptions, we’re thinking of a subscription model of $5/month.

A friend who is a trauma therapist said she’d recommend it to some of her clients, and of course, there is the market of people who are looking to buy vagal nerve devices, and we can offer a lower cost alternative - and you don’t have to wait for shipping :)

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Are there any scientific studies regarding the efficacy of this technique?

TBH, the studies we've found haven't been very well done (we come from a research background).

I was just discussing with my co-founder how we can do a quick study and measure effectiveness compared to other meditation devices.

Vagal nerve cannot be measured directly, so often it is measured through HRV, comparatively.

We have a background in EEG, so we're going to be looking at that compared to meditating brains.

Keen to hear thoughts on other methods of validating though.

Honestly I was just trying to give you an opportunity to pitch to what I consider to be the top question whenever anybody makes medical claims. I didn’t really expect you to have a solid answer, especially regarding your app specifically considering it’s a new project. I do think you should have summaries of studies on the general concept of vagal nerve stimulation and what benefits that can provide.

Thanks, we could have posted the studies, but we just didn't feel they reached out standards. We had a long-discussion this afternoon. We work in an industry (sleep) that is so full of snake oil, and we're very conscious not to be put in that bucket.

We're going to update the website regarding some of the benefits of using the app, without the vagal nerve stuff, and we are aiming to do a comparison to meditation monitored via EEG in the coming weeks.

We're based out of a university, and are reaching out to people here who may be interested in doing a proper study looking at impact on specific areas, such as menopause and hot flashes, which has some decent studies, but we don't want to go out making those kinds of claims until we can prove we are having that kind of effect.

What we do know is that people who are using the app are enjoying it, and finding it soothing and relaxing. So at the moment we're looking at a "meditation for non-meditators position".

I'm excited to try this out. I recently came across HRV meditation and find it works pretty good for me. I had a similar idea where I was going to make an app that would use haptic to kind of match your breathing rate and guide you into HRV resonance zone to enter a meditative state

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA_hOKd0Djw&t=2s&pp=ygUVaHJ2...

There are a few apps on the app store which use haptics to guide breathwork, though there is a HUGE opportunity for improvement.

I found the UX of them to be horrible, but I also think communicating the in-breath to the out breath is challenging to do with haptics, but I'm happy to be proven wrong, maybe that just hasn't been done well either.

I was glad to have the opportunity to try it, and I’ll probably try it again, but I only made it two minutes into my five minute singing bowls immersion before I got too annoyed with the experience and stopped. (I’m easily annoyed with meditation, too, fwiw.)

What kind of "annoyed" can I ask?

reminds me of https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/25/13046770/rez-trance-vibra...

lol, I'd never seen that before, but when looking at how to make haptics, there are lots of haptic body suits. I'm wondering if someone (not me) should just make a vibrator with an open api, but I guess that's what I'm using your phone as :)

It sounds like you’re looking for https://buttplug.ion

Curious if you have plans for an android app as well?

I started building for Android, and it was just ok, but when I moved to iPhone, the haptics have much more fine-grained controls, and the haptic motors are consistent between devices.

I'm not sure how to handle that for Android atm, but I'm on Android, so I wish we did have one :)

Not available in other regions ?

It's available in most regions, we're not based in the US. Can I ask where you are where it isn't available?

South Africa

Oops, you were right. I added South Africa.

Seems a bit silly to add individual countries. Why not add all?

The app is currently only in english, and I don't have "visual" guides yet, so I figured I'd stick with English speaking focus.

That was my thinking, particularly for when we start charging for it. We'll be looking to internationalize it in the future.

Often translations suck (one often can't machine translate because context is needed), so I'd say more than often people prefer the English language apps even though the rest of their OS is in a native language.

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