Thea

Overview

Thea reads your emotional state from your voice. You record a short check-in, AI analyzes it into a “vibe”, and the app prescribes audio meditations tailored to move you toward how you want to feel. It pairs with the Thea Ring, a Bluetooth wearable that adds heart rate variability, body temperature and emotional coherence, and ships with an iPad admin app for the client.

My role

I built the iPhone and iPad Admin apps with the WestLink and Thea teams, alongside designers, backend developers and QA, on a 12-week deadline set by the CES 2025 debut. I lead two Senior iOS Developers.

Hardest part

A single check-in records your voice, streams the analysis back, and reads live biometrics from the ring, all in one flow that then plays a meditation. Recording and playback fight over the same audio session, and analysis takes long enough that a spinner would break the calm the app is selling.

I built a dedicated audio session layer that owns switching between recording and playback so the two never collide, and streamed the analysis over server-sent events so the check-in animates through its result as it arrives instead of waiting on one response.

Architecture & stack

Swift and SwiftUI in MVVM, with Moya for networking, EventSource for SSE streaming, and Realm for persistence.

CoreBluetooth for the ring, AVFoundation for recording and playback, and bar, line and pie charts written from scratch in SwiftUI so the progress visuals could match the design exactly. Lottie and gradient-based animation for the vibe visuals, Firebase for analytics and crash reporting.

Achievements

• Delivered in 12 weeks, in time for the CES 2025 debut
• Helped the client secure an additional $3M in funding