PRISMap: Making the Invisible Visible

What Inspired Us

The inspiration for PRISMap began with a simple observation of the moments that matter most to us. Arguments with people we love and breakthroughs in therapy are some of the moments we often struggle most to put into words.

We kept returning to one question: How can we diminish the gap between what you feel and what you can say in conversations?

We were deeply influenced by "Inside Out", specifically its central lesson that emotions aren't obstacles to understanding ourselves. Being able to identify and understand emotions such as joy, sadness, anger, and fear helps us overcome barriers. We also drew inspiration from how a prism doesn't create the colors of light, but reveals them, and makes what was always there finally visible. This is exactly what we wanted our product PRISMap to do for human emotion.

What We Learned

Building PRISMap forced us into deep research into emotion science. We learned that humans have far more than five emotions. The most important thing we learned came from Lisa Barrett's constructed emotion theory, which argues that emotions aren't fixed, but constructed from two fundamental dimensions of valence (pleasant-unpleasant spectrum) and arousal (low-high energy spectrum). Emotional granularity is also a huge foundational insight, which refers to how the richer your emotional vocabulary, the more distinct emotional experiences you can actually have, as you can only feel what you have words for.

The Technology Landscape

We learned that the sensors required for PRISMap either already exist or are emerging rapidly: HRV (heart rate variability) monitoring, EEGs (neural emotional signatures), Neuralink (thought to text), and non-invasive BCI (brain-computer interfaces). This showed us that the gap between what exists today and the full PRISMap vision is a technology gap, and not a human need gap.

What Therapy Actually Needs

Through conducting a user survey and interviews, we learned that the emotion was always there, but the language wasn't. Focusing on therapy patients who are motivated by change, we learned that the biggest gap in mental healthcare isn't what happens in therapy sessions, but the time between them. By the time someone sits across from their therapist, the felt emotions of those moments fade.

Challenges

Current emotional tools ask you to report how you feel at the moment you're least able to. Our solution was to utilize future directions of technology, with the BCI and wearable able to capture this data passively. However, our product PRISMap captures this most intimate possible data. Thus, we made sure to highlight transparency and architecture. All data is stored locally on the device; only the user's side is captured, and no social features are included.

To account for clinical responsibility, PRISMap never suggests solutions or assumptions; it only visualizes data for personal reflection, so interpretation belongs to the patient and a trusted, licensed therapist.