The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2020–2023
Pi-a's Lungy makes each breath move nature visuals, turning breathing drills into play
Lungy's technology reads every breath and generates real-time nature visuals and audio, making breathing exercises an immersive game instead of a passive drill.
Pi-a (Lungy Health)
What it had to solve
Breathing exercises benefit mental and physical health, but most apps deliver recorded instructions that users passively follow and soon abandon. Lungy Health set out to transform breathing practice into an immersive, interactive experience and to incentivise it over the short and long term.
How it works
Breathing exercises are a proven tool for both mental and physical health, yet most mindfulness and rehab apps present them as recorded instructions: close your eyes, follow the audio, repeat. Lungy Health wanted to turn that passive routine into an immersive, interactive experience, with a technology that could motivate people over the short and long term.
The creative core is responsiveness. Pi-a's technology reads the user's breath and uses it to generate nature-inspired visuals and audio in real time — a cloth blowing in the wind, dandelions dispersing, a nebula swirling — so each inhale and exhale visibly shapes the world on screen.
The first product launched as a wellness app for stress and anxiety, making breathing feel powerful rather than prescribed. The same interactive technology was designed to be developed further into a platform for patients with breathing problems such as asthma, COPD and long-Covid.
The app earned design-press attention and a place in the D&AD awards archive as a next-generation breathing platform, showing how interaction design can fix the engagement problem at the heart of breathing therapy.
Why it lands
- Real-time response creates a feedback loop: the user sees their own breath change the scene, which makes the exercise feel effective instead of abstract.
- Meeting users on the phone removes the barrier — the device people already hold becomes the breathing tool.
- Nature-inspired visuals make each breath pleasurable to watch, so the practice rewards itself rather than depending on willpower.
- Starting as a wellness app built a consumer proof point before the same technology moved into the clinical world of asthma, COPD and long-Covid.
What it did
The wellness app made breathing interactive rather than passive and earned design-press coverage plus a place in the D&AD awards archive; the same breath-reactive technology was slated to become a clinical platform for asthma, COPD and long-Covid.
What you can take
The way to make people do their exercises is to give the exercise a visible effect: when each breath moves something beautiful on the phone they already hold, the drill stops being homework.
Since then
Lungy reached the public in early 2023 as a wellness app, with design press covering the doctor-led story behind it. Pi-a planned to keep the consumer app separate from a medical version, Lungy Health, built on the same breath-reactive technology for patients with breathing problems, and the concept is preserved in the D&AD awards archive.
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