Twingio helps people record and learn from patterns of their own sensation.

The name Twingio comes from the idea of a “twinge” – sensations that may be persistent, may be fleeting, but don’t feel good. Torrey owns Twingio, and is responsible for Twingio’s design, business, and software development, end-to-end. Twingio began in early 2015, and the beta opened January 1, 2016.

The basic principle for the body design is this: If it doesn’t look personal, the app won’t feel good enough, feel like you enough, to work.

The design for Twingio’s body language includes  mix-and-match options for body shape, limbs, hairstyle and haircolor, and t-shirt emblem.

• Facelessness gives the body language extra importance.
• The bodies are clothed, because examining your own naked body (in this context) is not sexual, but either dead or medically creepy. You don’t want to show people that.
• The body posture projects confidence and ease by using asymmetry, with the shoulders down and back, arms relaxed and ready

As one alpha tester said: “When I could choose my hairstyle, it went from being it to being me.”

To show sensation in Twingio, colored, translucent shapes cover the entire body, back and front—everywhere there are nerves, there can be sensation.

The shapes have high opacity for higher intensity, low opacity for low intensity.

The areas had to be big enough to be meaningful—and the areas also have to be small enough to be meaningful.

By making the areas overlap, and slightly convex, the areas look more natural, less medical and sterile. This isn’t about dissecting a body, nor about creating a myth of scientific precision.

The areas stretch and flex to cover each body shape—with separate, dynamically-drawn SVG paths for each body shape—but they mean the same thing. That means that if someone chooses a different body shape later, their existing records can still play back for them.

If a future, potential researcher were to look at an anonymized set of data from several people, the body regions would be comparable regardless of the body shapes of the people.