Design engineering for mental health

Working with psychologists, designers, and engineers, Jack and his team looked at ways new tech can help with stress and anxiety.

I'm Jack Hooper and I work for Doppel.

I'm an engineer on a mission to improve mental wellbeing.

So the whole team was really passionate about mental wellbeing and we could see that technology was having an impact on how people feel and how they behave, everyone's stuck into their mobile phones, and we came up with the idea, well what if technology was actually made to have an impact on how people feel for positive reasons to help with stress or anxiety.

And so we worked with psychologists, designers and engineers, a whole group of people from different backgrounds to come up with Doppel and create a piece of physical technology that could have a positive impact on people's mental wellbeing.

So Doppel is a wristband that can make the wearer feel more calm and focused. And it does this with a vibrating heart beat that's created by the motor you can see spinning on the face and that's calibrated to your resting heart rate. Which is when you feel calm. And like music when it's slow it calms you down.

So we take your resting heart rate using your phone and then using that we set a rhythm that will be calming for you and you can then turn it on using the phone, or using the touch controls. And it can be used anywhere because it's silent, so I use it at work but someone could use on their commute or for their exams, or anywhere where they feel stress or anxiety.

I love engineering because it gives me that ability to make real things and to have a big impact on the world. One of the things I love most about my job is the impact we have and when we hear back from people that we've actually changed their life that's a huge thing for us and it makes all the work that we put in worth it.