Attune

The problem

People with ADHD often know that where they work matters as much as how long they work, but it’s hard to say what makes one place better than another. Is it the noise? The light? How much is moving around you? Memory is a bad tool for comparing a library on Tuesday with a café on Saturday.

What we built

My partner Nathan and I built Attune and submitted it to the Congressional App Challenge and the Presidential AI Challenge. It has three parts.

The necklace. An Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense measures light, sound level, motion, temperature, and humidity, and streams the readings to the phone over Bluetooth. The microphone is only used to compute a loudness level on the device, so no audio ever leaves it.

The app. You start a focus session, the phone connects to the necklace, and the app logs your surroundings while you work. Afterward it asks how focused you felt. The app also has focus zones, a calendar, and stats on your sessions over time.

The analysis server. Once you have enough sessions, the server looks at the ones you rated highly and works out your ideal conditions for each factor. It weights each session by how focused you felt, so your best sessions count most. It also checks how each factor relates to your focus and turns that into plain advice, such as “lower noise may help you focus better.” During a session, if your surroundings drift away from your ideal conditions, it uses an AI model and your past feedback to write a short nudge.

My role

I built the hardware and firmware and wrote the analysis and nudge server. Nathan led the React Native app, and we worked on the app’s session flow together.

Explanation video