“In a very simple way, we’re using technology to sense whether a person is present or not,” Cheng says.Ĭheng and Woxneryd designed Sway to elicit the relaxation response, a term Harvard physician Herbert Benson coined in the 1970s to describe a physiological state in which muscles relax and blood flows more readily to the brain. Move at the right pace and a soothing audio mix will play over the speakers interrupt your movement, or tilt the phone too far in one direction, and you’ll get a notification urging you to refocus. It requires slow, consistent, and deliberate motion, whether that’s swaying back and forth with the phone in your pocket or walking with intention down the street. The app uses the phone’s gyroscope and accelerometer to measure a person's voluntary attention. With Sway, the phone becomes the teacher.
“How can we help people destress, refocus and recharge anywhere, anytime as part of their normal lives?” “The problem we’re trying to solve is an important one,” says Marcus Woxneryd, head of Ustwo Malmo. Sway, which is now available in the App Store for $2.99, is their second release, and its end goal is similar to Pause's. Nearly two years ago, Cheng and Ustwo built Pause, another mindfulness app, in which you use your finger to follow the path of a floating blob of pigment as it moves around your phone's screen. Sway is a new app from interaction designer Peng Cheng and Ustwo's Malmo studio that uses the phone’s sensors to guide people through meditation practice. After five minutes of this repetitive motion, a gentle chime sounded, and a notification popped up telling me I had met my meditation goal for the day. “You were going too slow,” it prompted me a few minutes later when I accidentally dozed off. “Direct your attention to the movement,” the app Sway told me as I unconsciously sped up the rhythm of my languid to-and-fro. As the firetruck next to me blared its sirens, I cradled my phone in my hands and swayed back and forth to the sounds of whooshing water and chirping birds. And yet, the other day I found myself stuck in traffic feeling tranquil, or at least less agitated than I’d usually be given the circumstances. Of all the places to meditate, the backseat of a yellow cab isn’t ideal.
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