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HabitAware Keen Bracelet
HabitAware’s Keen bracelet is a smart tracker that is designed to make people aware of their behaviours. It is specifically designed for people suffering from Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors. BFRBs are complex disorders that cause people to have an uncontrollable urge to pull/pick their hair or skin resulting in noticeable physical damage. Most of the time, BFRB is a coping mechanism for stress, anxiety, boredom, and other triggers that serves the mind a sense of relief after performing them. Three common types of BFRBs are hair pulling (Trichotillomania), skin picking (Dermatillomania) and nail-biting (onychophagia).

How it started
In 2019 at 10th annual TEDxFargo, Aneela Idnani Kumar, founder of Keen, shared her personal journey of how suffering from the personal loss triggered her to lean towards hair pulling as a coping mechanism. She described her actions to be self-soothing to the brain, which soon turned into unbreakable habit. Until one day, Aneela and her husband, Sameer, decided to do something about, and the idea of Keen was born.

Initially, the venture kicked off with the couple and two of their friends. Soon, the product gained recognition and was funded which led the team to grow to a size of 8. The team is now actively working towards educating and spreading awareness on various platforms, along with continuously improving Keen.

How it works:
Keen makes use of Motion and Gesture detection to detect motions for hair pulling (trichotillomania), skin picking (dermatillomania) & nail biting (onychophagia). It’s algorithm primary uses position of the bracelet relative to the ground and motion speed to make these calculations.

Right out of the box, the product comes with Keen bracelet and the Keen App. Customers need to use the app in order to train the bracelet to their specific target locations. Keen uses vibrations to bring awareness to one’s hands and practice replacing one’s unwanted behavior with healthier coping strategies.

Keen App:
Keen app is a lightweight mobile application that is available on both IOS and android platforms and requires IOS 12.4 or later, and Android 5.1 or later to work respectively. The app aims to achieve three goals. First, the app provides quick interactive courses on BFRBs and how Keen works. Second, the app provides functionality to keep track of the progress and is in-synced with the number of times bracelet buzzed to notify hand movements. Lastly, the application has built-in digital journal that help users better understand their triggers which can be a specific task (studying or working), at specific places (only at home, or at work desk), and/or during specific times (working hours).

Training Keen:
Keen’s Director of Business Development & Awareness, Ellen Crupi, describes the best way to train Keen bracelet is by “starting with [a single] behaviour”. Launching the Keep App, one must select only one BFRB at a time, then scan the area of the body exactly how one normally would when doing the behaviour (scan scalp for hair), along with using the app’s gesture recording feature so the next time when one is about to pull/pick, the bracelet would vibrate.

==== Keen Icons and what they mean : ==== The Keen2 bracelet comes with a few icons that indicate the user’s statistics. For example


 * Target Icon - Number of Vibration
 * X - Cancel Vibration
 * Steps Icon - Step Tracker
 * Date and time windows - synced to the app
 * Balloon - you “Beat Keen”

First release, and updates since then:
In 2018, HabitAware released its 1st generation Keen bracelet. It received an enormous amount of customer feedback; Some were positive, and some reported that they were getting too many false alarms (the bracelet vibrates when it shouldn’t). Due to this, the company decided to improve their algorithm to increase its gesture detection accuracy. In 2020, HabitAware released its 2nd generation Keen bracelet, Keen2. This time around, a lot more customers were happy with their product, and it seems to have been significantly improved from the 1st generation.

Team :

 * Aneela Idnani Kumar - Designer and Trichster (someone who suffers with trichotillomania – hair pulling – disorder)
 * Sameer Kumar - CEO
 * Kirk Klobe - CTO
 * John Pritchard - Lead Hardware Engineer
 * Ellen Crupi - Director of Business Development & Awareness
 * Mari Larsen - Lead Designer & Marketing Coordinator

Awards:

 * 2018 – Nation Institute of Health (NIH) Research Grant
 * 2018 – TIME Magazine’s best inventions 2018
 * 2019 - National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Grant
 * 2020 - National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Grant
 * Various - featured in The Washington Post, Prevention, SELF Magazine

Recognition via competing

 * 2018 - MN Cup Startup Competition
 * 2018 - Tekne for Best Startup
 * 2019 - MEDA $1 Challenge