By Aminah Colin-Lopez on April 17th, 2026
How are you?
It’s the most common question we hear, yet for many of us, the answer is almost always automatic: “Good, and you?” However, beneath this scripted “good” often lies a more complex reality, such as stress, exhaustion, and tiredness, among others. Do we feel that telling the truth about our feelings is a burden? For many, explaining how we truly feel seems like a load we aren’t ready to take on. This is not only a common experience in daily life, but also one that students face, especially when entering college for the first time.
This is the challenge that students from the University of Nevada, Reno set out to solve. Vedant Malhotra, Joseph Jacobson, and Shayan Hosseini were advised by EmotiBit’s Founder, Sean Montgomery, on the design of a well-being app. Jacobson recalls, “With getting thrown into college– that was my first time feeling real anxiety– so that grew a personal interest [in mental health].” Jacobson continues, “That experience, combined with their ongoing work at UNR, made the process of developing a well-being tool feel like a natural next step.” Since the start of their college careers, this team has been focused on creating mental health resources, including apps for mental health. This planning and consideration led them to win second place in the Global Impact category of Engineering Design.
Beyond the Data: Friendship Awareness
To ease the time-consuming burden of data entry, the app integrates various biometrics, including EDA (Electrodermal Activity) and PPG (Photoplethysmography). EDA measures the skin’s electrical conductance–often changed by sweat–which informs emotional changes in the body. On the other hand, PPG measures heart rate, and that is commonly used to track physical stress. While a student might report “I’m fine” during a stressful week in school, the supportive app provides information that their body is in a state of high tension. The SoulSync team found that the sweat conductance produced was one of the most reliable indicators to point to a direct measure of nervous system arousal linked to emotions.
By tracking heart rate (a derivative of PPG) and arousal (measured with EDA), SoulSync can provide a more objective ground truth to a user’s mental wellness than self-reporting alone. Using data directly from the user’s physiology, they were able to gather an unbiased sense of the user’s emotional state.
The app provides a helpful companion that assists students who may struggle to self-report their stress accurately. SoulSync is designed for easy input of data. Users can input their mood and emotion easily within the interface for things such as songs, activities, workouts, and calendar events. Jacobson considers, “Current solutions often require extensive manual input, lack real-time data, and also have a disconnect between the users’ lives and their relationships.” So, this would look like adding an emotion, such as when listening to a song, logging an emotion when attending class, or just your overall state for the day.
Malhotra acknowledges, “All of this data combined allowed us to gain deeper insights into our daily lives. We saw how certain things affected our mood or emotions. This project gave incredible insight into how the things we do every day affect how we feel every day.”
Adding the “Raw” Emotions
EmotiBit adds another dimension of raw biometric data. Many mental health apps rely on our own perception of feelings, which can be clouded at times. EmotiBit offers a reliable approach that helps us to understand our body’s natural stress response and what it may be feeling at that specific moment.
While using other biometrics, what stood out about EmotiBit was the authentic, live data. Jacobson demonstrates, “But it was fun attempting to reflect how people are feeling by the graphs. And we were close in some, we were able to tell if there was a peak in someone’s emotion, whether that be happiness, anger, or pain.” The cool part about using graphs is being able to see what people are feeling in real-time.
When viewing the EmotiBit data, it is important to understand that the high peaks on the graph represent a change over time relative to a person’s baseline. An emotion like anger or excitement isn’t inherently bigger in a graphical sense; it rather results in elevated physiological signals– such as heart rate or skin conductance–compared to that user’s resting state when relaxed, bored, calm, or sleepy. Also, there is a distinction between the data collection and its display. The EmotiBit hardware acts as the recorder, capturing raw physiological changes.
The team created a custom graphic interface and a custom algorithm that visualizes these fluctuations over time. From there, either the user or an algorithm can interpret higher or lower signals against a personalized threshold to classify the emotional state, Jacobson continues, “We can tell a difference between the heightened and lower emotions. That’s a glimpse of everything involved in EmotiBit.” Highlighting that the data provided by EmotiBit is only one part of a larger system. By referring to this as a glimpse, it underscores that this data is not only about reading sensors but also how it can be a companion for mental health awareness.
Feelings No Longer a Burden
This project was undertaken for the University of Nevada, Reno, College of Engineering as part of the senior project capstone. SouSync was made possible by resources from Connected Future Labs, the Innevation Center Makerspace, and the University of Nevada, Reno.
By using these advanced sensors to catch mental health and emotions, SoulSync provides a blueprint for future engineers and researchers on how technology can be used to prioritize well-being. The creation of this app is an opportunity to catch up with a friend and to truly understand how we feel. It stands as an entrance to what undergraduate innovation can achieve, where technology can help foster human connection.
