This project focuses on young people living with chronic pain—especially chronic musculoskeletal conditions that have no cure but must be managed daily. These conditions often lead individuals to strive for a “healthy identity,” which can result in an intense need to control the illness due to its sporadic, silent, and recurring nature. As a result, understanding the pain and asking for support becomes difficult: you may appear functional and healthy, yet experience significant discomfort beneath the surface.
Rather than avoiding discomfort and recurring pain, Visible invites you to return to your body—to listen and care for it. Visible is both a pain recorder and a device that affords massaging. The intensity with which you use it on your body is captured through vibration feedback, and a corresponding visual is generated in the app. In this way, Visible holds your pain accountable.
After recording physical discomfort, the app prompts you to reflect on your experience by asking:
“If your pain could talk, what would it say?”
This allows you to acknowledge and document your mental discomfort as well.
And on days when you're too exhausted to talk but still long for a moment of care, your pain can travel wordlessly. You can send a visual message to a loved one—a glimpse into what you're feeling that day, shown through the app and device. Visible helps build a personal standard of pain—not for comparison, but for deeper understanding. It gives chronic pain patients a way to externalize what’s often left unsaid.
As Desmond Tutu once said:
“Language creates the reality it describes.”
