Lungy iOS Breathing App

Lungy is a new mindful breathing app which responds as you breathe. I started working on Lungy in 2020, just as the first wave of COVID patients were coming into the hospital. It was a very stressful time for everyone, and many patients were given breathing exercises along with a plastic box, called an incentive spirometer, to encourage deep breathing. I noticed often the incentive spirometer would sit by the bedside, whilst the patient would be on their phone – this was the spark that lead to Lungy! I thought if the phone could respond to breathing in some way, breathing exercises could be much more fun and engaging.

This was my first time building an app – I started learning how to write code and create Figma wireframes in the long lockdown evenings after work. After 12 months, I was delighted to have a working prototype of Lungy! I then managed to win some grant funding for my company, Pi-A, to build a small team and finish the first version of Lungy. I’m delighted it’s finally released after 2.5 years and it’s available worldwide on the iOS App Store here.

This page is a record of some of the making-of videos from Lungy’s development. Lungy’s proper website is here with more finished visuals on the Pi-A site.

BREATH INTERACTION

Lungy uses the smartphone microphone +/- the camera to respond to breathing. This was the very feature I built in ~June 2020. Above can see SpriteKit visuals responding to the breath in real-time. The green trees aka dandelions use a fractal tree structure that is inspired by the branching of the bronchial tree in the lungs.

MUSIC + AUDIO

The audio is also generated and unique each time. The setup is fairly simple, I used AudioKit with a polyphonic synth and a sequencer that plays generated notes from a chosen scale (you can mess around with the sequencer and synth in Settings/Create Music!).

FLUID, CLOTH & SOFT-BODY SIMS

DEMO VIDEO