Learning how to be aware of face touching can reduce the number of times you transfer germs from hand to head area, potentially reducing the risk of self contamination. Especially nowadays.

Seems like a clever way to raise awareness about moments when you've possibly touched your face with your watch-wearing hand. Of course, I wear my watch on my left hand, but I'm right-handed, so I wonder if this would give me a false sense of security? @victoranastasiu can you tell us about the background/inspiration for this project?

@chrismessina our team is currently building a multiplayer wearable app to harmonise human interactions (soon to be hunted :)). When pandemic started we converted some of our team skills to build this app, which despite its apparent simplicity was not simple to be made on Apple's very restrictive ecosystem, explaining its unicity maybe. The psychological mechanism used is by triggering a simple pavlovian effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl...). Going back to your question, we touch our faces in an unconscious, balanced way with both hands regardless of how we consciously classify them. Using the App regularly even just for one hand, the unconscious gesture becomes conscious and potentially manageable to decrease its repeatability. More about why humans touch faces here https://www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Interesting idea. I tried it, however, I was doing some workout(bench press to be exact), and it wouldn't stop buzzing even when my hands were way far from my face. Seems to be like some bug with algorithm, I had to shut it off. Would love to be a bit more robust solution. :)

onWatch

First Apple Watch app to make you aware of face touching

First Apple Watch app to make you aware of face touching