Why we're building Foundational Health

If you’ve ever felt on edge in a buzzing open-plan office, or noticed your mood lift the moment you step into a dim, quiet room, you already know the core idea behind Foundational Health: your environment shapes how you feel.

For most people, that connection is a background hum: noticeable, but easy to ignore. For many autistic and neurodivergent people, it’s the foreground. Sensory input can be intense, persistent, and hard to filter. A flickering light can be the difference between a good afternoon and a meltdown.

That’s why we’re building Foundational Health starting with autistic and neurodivergent people.

Designing at the edges makes the center better

There’s a well-worn idea in accessibility: design for the edges and everyone benefits. Curb cuts were made for wheelchair users, but parents with strollers and travelers with luggage use them constantly. Closed captions help deaf viewers, but they’re also how a lot of people watch videos on the train.

Foundational Health is the same idea, applied to sensory wellbeing. If we can help an autistic person notice that lighting correlates with their afternoon overwhelm, we can help anyone notice that their noisy commute correlates with their short temper.

The autistic experience of sensory input isn’t an edge case we’re accommodating. It’s the * sharpest signal*, the place where the link between environment and wellbeing is clearest.

What we heard

Before writing a line of code, we talked to dozens of autistic adults, parents of autistic children, occupational therapists, and researchers. A few themes came up over and over:

• “I can tell something is affecting me, but I can’t pin down what.” The lag between cause and effect is often hours or days. By the time someone feels bad, the trigger is long gone.
• “I don’t want another thing to manage.” Mood-tracking apps that demand daily manual input get abandoned. Passive sensing was a recurring request.
• “I don’t trust apps with this kind of data.” Sensory data is intimate. It reveals how warm your space is, when you’re stressed, what your days look like. Privacy wasn’t a nice-to-have; it was a precondition.

Every one of those points shaped the product. Passive sensing. On-device processing. No raw audio. Export and delete with one tap.

What Foundational Health is not

We want to be honest about this: this is not a medical device. It doesn’t diagnose autism, ADHD, sensory processing differences, or anything else. It won’t tell you what to do. It’s a mirror, not a clinician.

That framing matters. The neurodivergent community has been burned by “solutions” that pathologize, surveil, or talk over them. We’d rather build a tool that helps people understand themselves on their own terms, and point to professionals when that’s what’s needed.

What’s next

We’re opening a small alpha in early 2027, starting with the autistic and neurodivergent people who’ve been asking for something like this for years. If that’s you, or someone you care about, join the waitlist — we’d love your help shaping it.

We’ll be writing here about the science behind sensory environments, the design decisions we’re making, and what we’re learning from early testers. Thanks for reading.