Gutsy
A speculative app that reads your gut through a smart pill the size of a vitamin.
Your gut sends signals about your mood, stress and immunity every day, and you never see them. Gutsy imagines a pill that reads those signals and an app that turns them into five readings you can act on. Our team of four designed it in four days at the Figma Buildathon. I worked on research, UX/UI and the prototype.
About 90% of the body's serotonin is made in the gut, yet no consumer health tool shows people what their gut is doing.
Yano et al., Cell, 2015Swallow a smart pill the size of a vitamin. It travels your gut, reads the signals and sends them to Gutsy.
01 · Framework
We sorted the gut-brain research into five dimensions before drawing a screen
The brief asked for a tool that tracks an invisible sense, and we pointed ours inward. Together we grouped what a capsule could plausibly read into five dimensions: metabolic, mental, hormonal, risk and immune. They became the dashboard's categories, so every later screen already had a place to go.
Gut data has no look of its own, so each dimension got a gradient orb on a near-black base, like looking inside a body. Pink is the only flat color, saved for actions.
Metabolic
Biome balance, absorption window, glucose
Mental
Serotonin, stress response, mood patterns
Hormonal
Cycle phase, circadian rhythm, endocrine signals
Risk
Patterns worth watching: glucose, cholesterol, inflammation
Immune
Gut wall strength, flare triggers
02 · People
We built three people around published findings, so every reading answers a real question
Each person pairs a frustration with a number from the research and the dimensions that would help. They decided which screens we built first.
Maya
Every month something takes her apart, and no doctor can tell her why.
64%
of women report mood symptoms every cycle.
UVA Health and Flo Health, 2022Gutsy findsHer afternoon anxiety follows her luteal phase and her morning coffee.
Dan
He trains every day and eats well, and his progress has stalled.
30–40 min
after intense exercise, blood flow to the gut drops, the window most athletes eat in.
de Oliveira et al., Sports Medicine, 2014Gutsy findsHis gut goes quiet after workouts, so he moves his meal later.
Emma
She has Hashimoto's. Her labs come back normal, but she has bad weeks with no reason.
75%
of Hashimoto's patients report flares with no trigger found in standard lab work.
Jonklaas, Curr Opin Endocrinol Diabetes Obes, 2017Gutsy findsDairy, then an immune spike 36 to 48 hours later, three times in four weeks.
03 · Safeguards
Swallowing a pill you can't see is scary, so we made its trip visible
For someone already worried about their health, a capsule inside them with no feedback is a black box. We added two safeguards. Setup steps tell you what to avoid and when to swallow. A live view shows where the pill is in your digestive tract, in real time.
A static frame can't show a capsule moving, so the live view is a Figma Make prototype. Most other screens stayed static so four people could finish in four days.
04 · Readings
Every reading ends in something to do, and we cut the one that could do harm
Each dimension opens to key metrics, insights and recommendations. The weekly analysis measures you against your own history.
The hardest call was hunger. Ghrelin, the hunger hormone, is a noisy signal: it spikes on a schedule and reacts to stress. A hunger score could mislead anyone, and for people prone to disordered eating it could do harm, so we left it out. The same reasoning made Risk show patterns worth watching instead of diagnoses.
Hunger score
Cut. A noisy signal that could feed disordered eating isn't worth the screen.
Where it stands
Gutsy is a concept, and the capsule it needs already exists
We presented Gutsy at the Buildathon and didn't win. The hardware is closer than it looks: in June 2025, Atmo Biosciences received FDA 510(k) clearance for a vitamin-sized capsule that measures gut gases in real time. We designed the layer above it: the five dimensions, the safeguards and what to leave out.
This was my first time designing with health data. I learned to ask "should we show this?" before "how do we show it?" Cutting the hunger score shaped the product as much as any screen we drew.
I'd test the live view with people who feel anxious about their health, and design how Gutsy tapers off: check often at first, then only when something feels off.