#openwave

If you want to try OpenWave on your Wear OS Smartwatch, click here. There’s also a similar application called Neurostrobe which runs on Android phones here

A few months ago I started getting ads for wearable devices that claimed to reduce stress. I get a lot of ads for various kinds of neurostimulators , but these were interesting because they claimed to use vibration to influence the autonomic nervous system, and thus your mood, alertness, and stress levels.

While it might seem odd that something that’s essentially a vibrating watch could do this, there’s a surprising amount of research on it. Much of this is from studying vibration in industrial settings; like how the vibration of driving a truck affects fatigue. Notably, vibration appears to impact alertness, as well as the balance of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, and even inflammation (when applied to the vagus nerve) Some of these findings need to be interpreted with caution (there’s potentially a big difference between the kinds of vibration you’d experience while driving, and the kind of vibration you get from a thing strapped on your wrist, for instance). But I thought it was interesting enough to try experimenting with. This lead me to make OpenWave, an app for experimenting with vibration stimulation on Wear OS smartwatches. OpenWave lets you deliver stimulation at specific frequencies and lets you modulate one frequency with another frequency, which is a function found in some devices and which may help improve the effect. If you’d like to try OpenWave you can install it from the Play Store here or see the source code on Github here.