Cigna: See Stress Differently

Awarded Cannes Lions Silver award for the Health & Wellness category

Sean Sullivan and I partnered up to create an interactive experience for Cigna as part of their global ad campaign entitled See Stress Diffferently ad campaign. The goal was to create an experience that would allow the user to see an artistic representation of the effects of stress on their body. The experience involved attaching biometric sensors and using that data in real time to create a responsive experience that told you a bit about what might be going on in your body in relation to stress. We used a mix of high fidelity Houdini animations mixed with real time visual effects. Users walked away with a printout and an email of the resulting images that were generated automatically in the experience.

W created 7 kits with redundant hardware, remote support tools, and associated support documentation. The entire experience was localized into English, Spanish, Thai, and 2 translations of Chinese (Hong Kong and Taiwan). The kits are being operated by local technical teams in locations across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and the USA throughout 2020. Sean was primarily responsible for creating the graphic content and designs, and I was primarily responsible for all of the custom hardware and software involved in the experience. In each kit, we used Touchdesigner to capture and interpret the sensor data, to create and capture the visuals, and to handle all of the integrations with back end systems that handled printing and emailing.

The data that we worked with was brainwave and heart rate data which we were able to capture with a bluetooth headset, and Galvanic Skin Response, which we were able to capture using a custom built device based in Arduino. We looked at the ratio between Alpha and Beta brainwaves, resting heart rate, and their overall GSR reading as indicators of a stress response, and used them to create an experience that was unique to each user and highly responsive to the sensor data being captured in real time.

For the visuals, Sean used Houdini to create a series of highly dynamic ray-cast particle animations. Each animation also included a set of “FOV” layers like the depth from the camera, data layers from the lighting calculations, and information about the particle physics algorithms. In total we used 7 HD playback layers to create visua effects like a heartbeat flashing across the surface of the figure in response to real-time heartbeat sensor data input. We used these real-time generative effects an a massive library of source content to ensure that each participant had a unique experience.

We also created a custom web app to help automate the experience for the user. After the experience, the user was presented with a printout of their result, and given the opportunity to enter their email into the iPad running the web app where they could input their email address to receive an email. All of the image capture, printing and interaction with the web app is automated so that the technician is only required for setup & troubleshooting, and the user can have a smooth experience free of any tech based interruptions.

Links

• Branding Asia

• Mumbrella Asia
  
  

Evan Gannon -- gannon.evan@gmail.com -- (516)635-4067