Deliverable
Market Study
Product Concept Development
Feasibility Testing
Product Design
PACE is a pair of wireless earbuds that enhances your mental capacity to process information. Most people have rituals before work or games to bring them a sense of readiness. Pre-Activity Calibration Enhancer, or PACE, leverages photonics technology to enhance the effect of these rituals. In hand with the PACE mobile app, which visualizes user's physical data, one can be more mindful of their mental-physical conditions and increase by about 24% mental power - become more resilient to stress, and more importantly, in the case of competitive sports professionals, spot potential injuries and take preventative actions during the game.
The Challenge: How might we actively increase readiness and improve the effectiveness of pre-game / pre-work rituals.
Stress nowadays is spontaneous and continuous, whether to a working professional or a competitive sportsman. An occupied mind unmanaged can lead to accidents and psychological problems such as depression, which is widely spreading among city-dwellers, not to mention poor performance in the competitive sports arena. With this in mind, PACE defines its purpose: to help individuals scientifically, enhance their capacity to deal with accumulated information loadings, maintain a sense of readiness, and keep a steady pace.
The Solution: Activate the Prefrontal Cortex via light technology that improves our ability to respond and our brain's capacity to process more information.
PACE introduces a new role to wearables, active enhancers. By projecting light at a specific wavelength through ear canal and triggering the Prefrontal Cortex activation, which governs cognitive tasks like reflexive orientation. The user improves the capacity to process information (readiness) and accelerates decision-making time (reflex). According to our study using NIRS, a device that visualizes brain activities and literature reviews, we estimate that PACE can potentially increase the user's mind power by 24%. Such clinical examination will provide our brand with a clear competitive edge and evidence to set ourselves apart.
Prototype testing with NIRS
Users wear this device as a typical wireless earbud, flexibly setting the duration of light exposure and syncing to their audio content to best match their ritual on the PACE mobile app. The bio-sensor embedded in the earbuds would allow the mobile app to track and visualize the user's blood oxygen level and heart rate as indicators of prefrontal cortex activities and, most importantly, to provide evidence that their ritual, in combination with PACE, has taken effect both scientifically and emotionally, adding a sense of confidence to the user before entering the competitive arena or an intensive work session.
Logo signature design
The design of PACE resembles the form of a pebble, which is calm and resilient. As a pebble that sits quietly in a running stream, PACE is designed with naturalism and minimalism to convey the idea of steadfastness in the running pressure. The design removes any features that may evoke unwanted emotion, retaining only its smooth and organic form. By integrating micro-led, we aim to minimize the device's size and accommodate equally critical audio components. The result is a lightweight and energy-efficient device that the user's essential ritual deserves.
In the future, PACE can be configured to enable specialists like surgeons, emergency-response personnel, or astronaut engineers who need to perform delicate tasks with surgical precision and stability. As flex work becomes mainstream, PACE can help individual working from less-than-ideal spaces or conditions to switch gears on-demand and enters the "zone" more effortlessly, maintaining productivity while enjoying a quality activity session.
