New bracelet is a personalized coach for both body and mind

If you feel like you’re on an emotional rollercoaster, this new bracelet might just be able to decipher what’s going on in your life.

Zenta, designed by London-based startup Vinaya, is a biometric band that interprets your emotions and helps you understand your own behavioral patterns. The bracelet’s sensors are able to measure your heart rate, movement and perspiration, before cross-referencing this information with data from your phone, such as your calendar, location and social media usage, to build an accurate profile of what triggers certain behavior and emotional responses. Company CEO Kate Unsworth explains how Zenta can improve your mind and body.

What is Zenta and why did you decide to develop it?

Zenta is our next generation wearable that works as a personalized coach for both body and mind. It is a smart wristband that uses biometric sensing technology that syncs with your smartphone to help you take control over your wellbeing.

By wearing Zenta as you go about your day (and night), you’ll start to learn more about the positive and negative patterns in your emotions and actions, like which time of day you are the most productive, how active you’ve been over the last month, how your daily surroundings affect your stress levels, or what affects your quality of sleep.

You can also interact with the wristband itself through touch and vibration alerts. It can help you stay focused and filter out endless digital distraction by, for example, alerting you when your boss emails you or your partner texts. The wearable can also subtly lead you through a breathing exercise during a stressful meeting or anxious moment, and even lets you feel your heartbeat digitally.

How does Zenta track the user’s emotions?

We like to say that Zenta is “inspired by humans, and perfected by science.” Emotions are the final frontier of science. Through our extensive fieldwork into the phenomenological experience of emotions and research in biometric signal data, Zenta is built on the very latest scientific understanding of how to decode our feelings.

At Vinaya, we recognize that wellbeing is about much more than just the physical; we can’t ignore our mental and emotional wellbeing. We’re not implying that people need a wearable device to tell them how they are feeling. But with the use of cutting-edge biometric sensing technology, clever user experience design and modern data science, you can actually learn things about yourself that you didn’t already know and use that insight to make positive change.

How does this device work?

Zenta uses the most advanced sensing technology and machine learning algorithms to collect and synthesize all kinds of cues from your body, mind and digital life. By tracking things such as your blood oxygen levels, heart rate variability, skin temperature and breathing patterns, we can begin to determine things like stress levels. However, Zenta goes a lot further by cross-referencing this biometric data with data from your smartphone, such as how many emails you receive or how many meetings you have booked, as well as a few subjective touch points in the app.

We’re also looking to evolve the product in the vein of the “Internet of Things,” so that you’ll be able to interact with other devices and services.

How accurate is this technology?

Every body and mind is completely unique. Our emotional experience is entirely individual — and it’s exactly on that principle that we’ve built this smart technology. Through our machine learning algorithms, the Zenta experience builds a more accurate profile of you over time. So the more you wear and interact with it, the more it can be individualized and the more insightful it will become.

What’s the difference between Zenta and other wearable tech products?

We believe this product can give you valuable context to your data, far beyond just counting your steps. Where existing fitness trackers and wearables focus on tracking your data, Zenta goes one step beyond this by combining notification management, sleep monitoring, activity tracking and emotion tracking.

Plus, it looks great too! We designed this as a product with both modern men and women in mind. There are three different design models. As we’re currently crowdfunding the product via an Indiegogo campaign, we’ve got a stretch goal to introduce three additional beautiful designs.

Is the user’s personal information kept private?

Of course! Creating a humane data culture is a big part of our company DNA. We are obsessively protective over our users’ privacy and only use data toward making our algorithms more accurate. We also employ sophisticated encryption algorithms across all communication layers to ensure the highest standard of data privacy. We want to evolve our product to be as transparent as possible to the user, so that they know exactly what they are sharing at all times.

—Daniel Casillas