Breathe With Me

Breathe With Me is a wearable t-shirt that leverages the expansion and compression of pneumatics to encourage the wearer to focus on and control their breathing during moments of panic and anxiety.

What inspired you to make this project?:
I can remember a reoccuring moment from my childhood in which I am eating cereal at the breakfast table before school, when I unexpectedly feel nauseous and begin to shake. I fall down onto the floor and make my mom check for my heart beat. However, in just a couple of hours, I am feeling normal again. At the time neither myself, my mom or even heart doctors knew what was wrong with me, but looking back, these episodes were so clearly panic attacks. To this day I continue to experience symptoms of anxiety such as shaking, lightheadedness, and obsessive worry about mundane events that often manifest into panic attacks.

Although I now understand what is happening to my body in these moments, I have not yet mastered how to prevent the episodes from occurring. The stress will follow me home and keep me awake all night. I have been on medication for many years, but only recently began learning about alternative therapies such as meditation and deep breathing techniques. For my thesis project, I wanted to develop a new therapeutic system that utilized the benefits of diaphragmatic breathing and could be taken with me everywhere.