Sensie
Team involved
César Álvarez
Design Director
Emilio Sánchez
Cofounder
Luisa Jara
Product & Motion Designer
Manolo Ortega
CDO
Marta Becerra
VP Product
RECOGNITIONS
Summary
Mike Dannheim, Sensie’s founder, dealt with enough stress helping lead the international expansion of Groupon throughout Asia and being part of the management team of a hot YCombinator-backed tech startup, to know that something needed to change.
He wanted to use our powerful mobile devices to help us connect with the wisdom of our bodies and make the most of it. We joined his challenge of creating Sensie, an app with a unique approach to well-being that fuses neuroscience and ancient wisdom with modern technology.
Fall to get back up
The tale of the startup Sensie is a long story of overcoming that started when its founder, Mike Dannheim, suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident at the age of 20. He recalls how the Western medical system deemed him helpless and thought he would suffer from short-term memory recall issues for the rest of his life.
It was a hopeless situation, but after he almost hit rock bottom, he started a new way of living focused on meditation and mindfulness, practicing daily. Six months later, his life began to take off, and nothing would be the same. Mike started asking himself how our powerful mobile devices could help us tap into the wisdom of our bodies.
Building meaningful
partnerships
Mike joined his friend Thomas Gersten, a software entrepreneur who has over 20 years of AI and engineering experience, as well as a wealth of experience in the healing arts. Not only that but also helped Tomas lead the development of Xbox Kinect and Azure at Microsoft.
Together, they built a research platform and began working with some of the world's top researchers with backgrounds from MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, UC Berkeley, and Stanford to find answers to their questions.
But it was when Mike partnered with Satyen Raja and his WarriorSage leadership training that things took off like a rocket. Thanks to Satyen's work, they realized they needed to integrate the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology with spirituality.
“Listen to your body. Let it guide you. It knows the way’’ became Mike and Thomas' mantra.
Ancient wisdom fused
with modern technology
Mike had a great purpose: to mix Eastern spiritual techniques and neuroscience with technology to help create access to deeper intelligence, creativity, and flow levels. He started scanning for the best design and development agencies they admired and found that Z1 was the perfect fit.
The founder, who is obsessed with how design can help customers, found that the beauty of working with Z1 lies in our ability to see deeper into the design process and come up with unique solutions that he wasn’t even thinking of, and then execute on the full delivery of the solution.
Addressing a design perspective
There were multiple complex design questions that we needed to overcome. The app combines the science of manual muscle testing and Natural Language Processing with machine learning techniques to help create an objective signal representing whether a present stimulus makes you strong or weak.
“Translating the science of manual muscle testing and Natural Language Processing with machine learning into a clear and intuitive user experience was a priority. We spent extra effort creating a compact design system and integrating complex algorithms and protocols into the interface in a user-friendly way.”
César Álvarez, Design Director at Z1
Regarding Sensie's UI, we relied on dark mode with high-contrast elements. This way, we emphasize the connection with science, achieving a unique style at the same time.
“Z1 really helped us tackle all our design questions in a way that left me in awe. They are a great partner who rolls up their sleeves and stays committed to the end. I’m grateful for the work we accomplished together.”
Mike Dannheim, Founder of Sensie.
An icon full of symbolism
Metatron’s Cube includes all 5 Platonic Solids hidden inside, symbolizing the underlying geometric patterns found throughout our universe. It is balanced and provides a visual focal point for meditation. It can replace negative thoughts with positive ones.
A technological bridge to connect soul and body
Sensie is designed to be our companion on the journey to connecting more deeply with our bodies’ intelligence. To achieve this goal, it uses the sensors in our smartphones to measure muscular tension, which helps us identify blockages in the nervous system. Then, the app provides simple practices to clear them in less than 3 minutes and tools to track our progress and well-being.
Transforming our smartphones into a mindset tool
The app amplifies emotional intelligence by using smartphone sensors to measure how our nervous system moves in response to our thoughts, emotions, or any stimulus. Our front-end engineers worked together with Sensie’s back-end team and built the app using React Native.
By boosting emotional intelligence, we can identify specific blockages in the body and offer personalized wellness practices to expand and regain a high-performance mindset - helping us to reconnect and learn to listen to our bodies’ critical signals.
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Making flow state accessible
Mike’s vision is billions of people accessing deeper levels of embodied intelligence, creativity, and flow. Nominated as one of the Best App Design by Design Rush, Sensie has become the connection that makes that vision possible.
After having raised $655K in pre-seed funding, the startup keeps expanding and exploring new features to transform stress into wisdom. We are confident that they have it easier now, thanks to the solid foundation we crafted for the app.