A speculative wearable and companion app that detects body-emitted chemical patterns and translates them into calm, ethical, and actionable emotional wellness insights.
Scentral was created for FigBuild, a design-a-thon challenging teams to design a future-forward tool that could track, measure, or quantify a human sensory experience. Our team chose smell — specifically, the invisible chemical signals our bodies emit that may reflect emotional and physiological changes before we consciously register them.
The result is Scentral: a wearable chemical-sensing band paired with a mobile app that translates subtle VOC patterns into emotional and wellness insights. It helps users recognize shifts in stress, fatigue, and physiological state — not as diagnoses, but as early signals worth paying attention to.
The prompt asked us to imagine a heightened or new sense, then design how users would detect, interpret, and responsibly manage that information. Smell presented a fascinating design space: it is deeply tied to emotion and memory, yet largely invisible and unmeasured in everyday life. Our challenge was to make abstract chemical data feel meaningful, understandable, and emotionally safe.
"What if invisible chemical signals could be measured and translated into meaningful self-awareness?"
Inspiration board — research into chemical sensing, scent-disease detection, and emotional physiology
Scentral consists of a wearable band that continuously detects body-emitted chemical patterns, paired with a mobile app organized into five core sections: Home (daily snapshot), Balance (stress and emotional patterns), Health (serious physiological irregularities), History (trends over time), and Profile (privacy and alert preferences).
Rather than surfacing raw biological data, the app uses a detect → visualize → reflect → act framework. Users are shown whether their patterns are within their personal baseline or shifting, and prompted to reflect on possible causes before deciding what action, if any, to take.
Scentral wearable band — continuous chemical-pattern detection
App home screen — daily Balance and Health snapshot
One of our most important structural decisions was splitting the app into Balance and Health sections. Balance handles everyday emotional awareness — stress patterns, fatigue, and how routine or environment may be affecting a user's state. Health surfaces more serious physiological irregularities that may warrant medical attention.
This separation created a clearer information hierarchy, allowing users to engage with their daily wellness without the app feeling constantly alarming — while still surfacing higher-priority signals when they matter.
Because Scentral deals with sensitive wellness data, tone was one of our most deliberate design choices. Alerts are framed as supportive warnings rather than diagnoses. Serious health-related insights prompt users to check in with their body, monitor symptoms, or consult a professional — never to panic.
We visualized VOC patterns across a two-week window compared against each user's personal baseline. This gave users the context to understand whether a shift was meaningful or within their normal range, without forcing them to interpret raw scientific data.
History view — two-week VOC pattern trend against the user's personal baseline range
Balance section — stress-related pattern detail and reflection prompts
Alert system — tiered notifications from gentle awareness to urgent health prompts
A user notices Scentral has flagged a gradual increase in stress-related chemical patterns over several days. The app shows their Balance score has shifted outside their personal range and prompts them to reflect on sleep, workload, and hydration — before they consciously feel burnt out.
A user with blood sugar concerns receives a Health alert that their chemical pattern has shifted unusually. The app encourages them to check their levels or contact a medical professional — without diagnosing the issue. A third user reviews their History view and identifies environmental triggers they can now bring to a healthcare provider as specific, time-stamped observations.
Storyboard — the detect → visualize → reflect → act user journey across three use cases
Turning abstract chemical signals into understandable insights required resisting the urge to show too much. VOCs and biological markers are not familiar metrics, so we had to create visualizations that felt grounded without oversimplifying the science or stripping context. The two-week baseline comparison became our solution: relative change is far more legible than absolute numbers.
We also had to balance usefulness with emotional safety. Too much detail could cause anxiety; too little could feel vague or untrustworthy. And throughout, we had to be disciplined about avoiding any framing that implied diagnostic capability. Scentral supports awareness — it does not replace clinical care.
This project deepened my understanding of how tone, transparency, and ethical framing shape user trust — especially when a product touches on health and the body. Designing for health-related data isn't only about making information visible. It requires deliberate decisions about what users see, when they see it, and how that information might affect them emotionally.
Future development would focus on validating sensing feasibility, defining detection thresholds, and conducting user research to understand how people emotionally interpret chemical wellness data. Potential partnerships with health technology researchers or medical professionals would help determine how Scentral could responsibly work alongside existing health systems.