Blink: how to build a health habit of daily eye care
Blink is an iOS app that cares for your eyes. It’s a daily eyesight trainer with a number of effective exercises that help your eyes to relieve tense and strengthen eyesight. Blink uses eye tracking to guide your exercise technique.
Why is it important?
The average user spends several hours a day looking at the screen of a smartphone. Of course, eyes get tired of it. And not only tired… Irritation, dryness, distortion and even muscles movements disorder can be caused by eyes tense.
According to the American organization of Vision Council, 59% of digital devices users, suffer from symptoms of usual fatigue.
To prevent severe visual impairment one can do simple, but yet effective part of vision preventive therapy — eye gymnastics. We’ve all heard about it somehow and maybe tried to do some. But here are always two problems:
- How motivate yourself to do these trainings regularly (obviously, health warning is never an answer)
- And what if I do something wrong?
So meet Blink. First, interactive trainer for eyes that guides exercises technique with eye tracking.
How Blink works?
Blink uses the device’s TrueDepth® camera system in order to track movement, position, blinking and winking of users eyes. Our approach is to get raw dynamic data from TrueDepth® camera and modify it according to individual characteristics of each user’s eye and their unique movement abilities.
UX is based on eyes only interaction and user’s motivation to focus on completing exercises with correct technique. The goal of visual solution is specifically made to help users to use peripheral vision and check exercise progress without looking at the screen.
Blink helps users to build good habit of exercising with eyes on regular basis through customizable notifications schedule and push notifications
Blink App: day one vs now
It all started from the idea of “eye gymnastics based on eye tracking app”. To share our idea with professionals we participated in the Emerge hackathon. Competing with more than 20 other teams we proved that our idea is needed and won the competition. But the best part of hackathon was comments from our mentors: they all wanted to install our app even thought it was still a raw prototype
It was the moment when we realised, that Blink should be developed and then published at App Store for real.
First prototype was only able to display eye movements of the user on the screen.
Second one was a bit mature and got us first place at hackathon.
Third one you can try at AppStore right now.
Blink budget and results
Blink budget looks quite modest: $ 1,500 was spent on development, $800 of which was invested in buying a test iPhone with a TrueDepth camera. That was enough to create an app that has more than 12K users so far.
Numbers is the most honest indicator to showing that Blink is loved by users:
And this all without advertising spends. Just with the help of ASO optimization and local media articles.
What’s next
Blink is still in the testing phase: you can try the its workouts here.
Of course, we plan to make Blink paid, but right now our goal is to improve user flow to be as comfortable as possible for the eyes and involving. We understand that building a habbit of eye care takes time and continuous development, but we are ready for it.
Therefore, it is extremely valuable for us to receive feedback from users.
And we will be glad to have your comments and suggestions.
