AI-guided anxiety intervention, exactly when you need it.
Solo Designer
Winter 2026
Figma
Elicit
Claude Opus 4.6
Figma Console MCP
Smartphone
Smartwatch
Proprietary smart band detects elevated physiological stress before panic peaks
App delivers a CBT-grounded anchor — breathing, grounding, or a Stoic reframe — immediately
Pattern learning personalizes detection thresholds over time
Intervene before cognitive function is fully impaired
Complete an anchoring technique in less than 2 minutes, in a public setting
Zero false-alarm fatigue: detection precise enough that every alert means something
Anxiety disrupts the ability to think clearly and act, yet existing tools wait for the user to open an app and start an exercise at exactly the moment they are least able to. Most people never do; avoidance is the most common response.
STOA reads the body’s stress signals and starts an intervention on its own, cognitive, behavioral, or somatic, matched to the moment. It covers the gap between needing help and being able to seek it.
A quick walkthrough of the AI anxiety intervention: the smart band detection, the anchor flow, and the Stoic voice that carries it.
User Research, Empathy Mapping, Jobs-to-be-Done, Design System, UI/UX Design, Prototyping, Wizard-of-Oz Testing
Just me + Claude as an AI design partner
6 weeks from research to prototype
I used Elicit, an AI-powered research assistant, to systematically synthesize 42+ academic sources. What surfaced drove every design decision that followed.
People fear the sensations of anxiety, the racing heart, the tight chest, more than whatever causes them.
Interventions triggered by personal physiological thresholds significantly outperform scheduled reminders or random notifications.
Consumer smartwatches show strong accuracy for anxiety detection. Personalized machine-learning models outperform generic approaches after a 1–2 week learning period.
Modern CBT descends directly from Stoic practice, so the Stoic voice is functional, not decorative: it's the original source of the cognitive techniques the app delivers. The evidence supports cognitive reframing alongside behavioral and somatic techniques, so STOA draws on all three, with Stoicism setting the tone.
They all pointed at the same requirement: the system has to make the first move, because someone mid-panic cannot be expected to open an app and search for help.
Literature Synthesis — 42+ sources synthesized with Elicit, across six research questions
Define — empathy map + Jobs-to-be-Done framework
CLAUDE.md Design Brief — visual and interaction rules, encoded once for every screen
Design System — tokens built to WCAG AAA contrast via Figma Console MCP
Storyboard & Screens — 10 AI-generated storyboard panels; UI built in Figma with Claude Code
Wizard-of-Oz + AI Critique — physical prototype tested live; screens critiqued by Claude as a skeptical engineer
Every choice ran through one filter: is this usable for someone experiencing an acute anxiety attack, in public, with shaking hands? The answer was to strip the interface to almost nothing: two standout colors, Aegean Deep for calm and Bronze for action, and no red or anything else that could read as alarm. For typography, Plus Jakarta Sans for the interface and Cormorant Garamond for Stoic reflection. The color names — Aegean Deep, Bronze, Obsidian, Marble White — trace to the ancient Mediterranean, where Stoicism began.
One vital sign, one streak, one last session. A stressed user needs reassurance at a glance, so the dashboard holds everything else back.
The bet the whole product rests on: detect an acute anxiety attack as it begins and reach out first, because no one opens a wellness app mid-panic.
The AI explains each recommendation, what it detected and why this technique fits, because an anxious user won’t act on advice they don’t understand.
The words of Stoic philosophers instead of a clinical script. The prompt copy was written as deliberately as the layout was designed, because the message those words carry is what helps someone calm down.
Five honest options, including “still anxious,” so the product records what actually happened instead of assuming success.
Episodes and recovery time, week by week, the numbers that show whether the product is actually helping.
A live, clickable Figma prototype of STOA: move through the flow the way a user in an acute anxiety moment would, from first reading to recommended intervention.
The CLAUDE.md design brief encoded the visual and interaction rules once, and every generated screen was held to it. Generating with AI is the easy part; the judgment is the work: deciding what’s true, what to cut, where the line sits. A sharp brief produces sharp output. A vague one produces confident nonsense.
Designing the recommendation screen, the question was never which intervention the AI should pick, it was whether an anxious person would believe it. So every recommendation shows its evidence, the readings that triggered it and why this technique fits. Advice that arrives without a reason is easy to dismiss, and someone mid-panic will dismiss it.
The watch detects the spike; the model proposes the intervention. But what actually calms someone — a Stoic voice instead of a clinical alert, the right tone at 140 BPM — came from research and empathy, not the model.
Across research, copy, and the build itself, AI kept the raw material coming, and my job was choosing between it all: what to keep, what was off, what to cut. The moment I stopped steering, quality fell off.
I’d prototype the failure state before the success state. It carries the highest emotional stakes in a mental health product, and I left it unanswered.
Onboarding jumps from anchor selection straight to a live BPM dashboard without explaining how physiological data is collected, stored, or used. A product that reads your body has to ask permission before it starts listening.
The wearable band disconnecting mid-exercise. A failed session. A false detection. Each one lands on a user who is already on edge, and the prototype never answered them.