I’m an NHS doctor and the founder of Pia (https://www.piahealth.co) which developed Lungy (https://www.lungy.app). Lungy is an iOS app that responds to breathing in real-time and was designed to make breathing exercises more engaging and beneficial to do. It’s been just over a year since Lungy launched (here’s the original ShowHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34534615) and it's had a huge update and complete redesign. We rebuilt the whole app, and added a real-time 3D soft body solver which gives some really cool interactions like blobs / objects that inflate as you breathe. We also made a version for Vision Pro, called 'Lungy Spaces'.
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 patients 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!
Since making the first version we’ve made exercises fully customisable (you can dial in exact timings for each breath phase), added new breathing indicators, learning modules, e.g. self-care for anxiety symptoms, and lots of new visuals. The free version gives you access to a new breathing exercise each day, whilst premium ($14.99 per year, $39.99 unlimited) unlocks the full library of exercises, exercise data and visuals..
The visuals are mostly built using Metal (a couple use SpriteKit) and there are lots to choose from - boids, cloth sims, fluid sims, a hacky DLA implementation, rigid body + soft body sims - each one reacts to breath and touch. 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). The nice thing about the visuals + audio being generative is that the download size is relatively small with no other downloads. We’re still working on improving the breath detection, using ML - currently, it uses microphone input, with optional camera input to guide positioning.
We’re also close to finishing the medical device version - http://lungy.health - designed as a pulmonary rehab platform for patients with asthma and COPD, it should hopefully be released in the UK early 2025.
Thanks for reading - would love to hear any feedback!
Lungy Version 2 here: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1545223887
Marketing note: I'm pretty sure it's regional, but in the very densely populated place I grew up, lungy was a synonym for loogie, which if you've never heard the term, is phlegm mixed with saliva forcibly spit at someone or something. Unfortunately, I just viscerally find that name pretty repulsive through some deep-seated associations that would be pretty stubborn to rewire and that would probably work against the app's intended function. I'm not sure how wide of a region that's true for, but like I said, it was a very densely populated part of the US.
This isn't a criticism, it's just that I'd want to know that if it was my app.
Maybe at some point we'll rename...
Make sure you get recommendations from someone you trust for some experts to consult on the process. You could surely just consult with one for a short amount of time just to get a superficial sense for whether or not its reasonable, and if it's not, how to mitigate any concerns if it even is a problem at all. (Sometimes people not knowing how to pronounce the name right, for example, can actually create conversation about your product, and if the product is high quality, that's not a bad thing!) Marketing consultants always seem like a waste of money, but for consulting on something as important as a name change, you could have an exponential ROI. Like if you were concerned about it and they said "this affects a tiny fraction of the potential users-- it's not even worth doing a survey" then even the peace of mind is worthwhile.
Breathing depth and rate is so closely linked to physiological stress. Breathing exercises are such a simple intervention to break this cycle but they do work surprisingly well.
Lungy is currently an app for people with healthy lungs - breathing exercises and mindfulness are effective at reducing anxiety and stress symptoms.
Also there's a lot less variety in Android those days, both SW and HW. Most have 1080p displays these days apart from the flagships, so UI should be consistent.
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We have some results for improved ML breath detection which could be quantitative (real-world values for flow & volume). I want it to go through peer review ideally and then would try to publicise the results.
Honestly the regulatory process I have found to be incredibly opaque and difficult. It's tricky to find out what exactly qualifies as a medical device, and then the process for certification. A company called Open Regulatory helped us and the flow chart here is helpful (for UK):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/software-and-arti...
I like 6 seconds in thru the nose, 2 seconds out thru the mouth (forcefully) for about 90 seconds, but would love to hear your thoughts!