Doppel: the new wristband that can regulate your mood

Stressed? Sluggish? A new wristband can use your body’s natural biorhythms to alter your mood. Phoebe Luckhurst embraces the buzz
Natural feel: the Doppel

A Londoner’s mood rockets up and down many times within any 24-hour period. There’ll be moments of elation (a free Pret coffee, shunting a pensioner sideways in order to shoehorn your bottom onto the last seat on the Tube) and moments of darkness (the hours between 9am and 5pm, forgetting your travelcard, paying council tax).

While this circadian trajectory is inevitable, you try to regulate the uncontrollable by administering shots: of coffee or of tequila, depending on the time of day and/or the seriousness of the crisis. This makes it worse, but self-medicating is now also part of the destructive cycle.

Tech comes to the rescue again: Doppel is a wristband that regulates your mood. It looks like a wristwatch. When you’re feeling stressed, you stroke it in an arc-like movement and it will pulsate slowly to calm you down; if you’re feeling tired, squeeze it and it’ll pulsate quickly to improve your focus. The technology is rooted in theories about biorhythms. Your body thinks the pulse it feels is yours, and speeds up or slows down in order to remain in synch.

There are other examples of biorhythms in the real world, explains mechanical engineer Jack Hooper: “For example, two people walking next to each other will fall into step, and people sleeping beside each other will match their breathing.”

Good vibrations: Team Turquoise, who invented the Doppel

Doppel has been awarded the Deutsche Bank Award for Creative Enterprise and been selected for funding by Innovate UK and accelerator programme FI-C3. Its creators, Team Turquoise — which is Hooper and three other technicians who all met at Imperial College and are based in Bermondsey — are seeking funding on Kickstarter to bring the product to market. The campaign is in its final hours and, at the time of writing, it has just under £3,000 left to make up a £100,000 funding target and has more than 650 backers.

When I meet Hooper he has just returned from a wearable tech conference in San Francisco. He compares the effect of his device to “music — but without the distraction”. Doppel was tested on more than 250 people and then an experimental psychologist performed a reaction-time test to measure whether it increased levels of focus and alertness. It found that reaction times improved.

Designer Nell Bennett suggests that it could be used for people who suffer from anxiety “and there’s no stigma to wearing it — it looks like a wristwatch”. She says it’s an alternative to charging up on caffeine and then finding yourself awake in the middle of the night, wired — a common London predicament. “It’s designed to be used in specific scenarios,” agrees Hooper. “So if you’re tired in the afternoons you’d use it then. Or if you’re anxious while preparing for a presentation.”

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I try it on. The pulsating is vigorous. Strangely, the stroking motion feels very natural — Hooper says that touching the inside of our wrists in this way is a common action. I hadn’t noticed. It would take some getting used to the pulsating, but it’s not intrusive and the wristband is stylish.

“There’s no active interference — no chemicals or electronics,” Hooper says. “It’s completely natural.”

Whether or not it’s a remedy for rocketing moods, it’s certainly better than a circle of life that runs off coffee and tequila.

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