FigBuild 2026
NeuraLyfe
See the invisible. Change the outcome.
TL;DR
NeuraLyfe is a hardware and interface system that makes CTE, the invisible brain trauma behind football's health crisis, measurable in real time. We designed a helmet-integrated wearable and an interface that turns cumulative impact data into visual insights medical staff can act on. See the final product.
After four sleep-deprived days, we found out we won 1st place out of 690 teams!
I worked on research, concept, and systems development, led design of the Roster view, and produced, filmed and edited the submission video.
My storytelling challenge: how do you make someone who doesn't watch football care about a player's brain damage?
Our submission video
Background
Four days to build something that matters
FigBuild is Figma's global designathon. This year, 5,718 designers across 4 countries registered to compete, building for the following prompt:
The Prompt
Design a speculative tool that tracks or visualizes something previously unmeasurable about the human sensory experience.
Our team landed on a problem we couldn't stop talking about: the National Football League (NFL) tracks every muscle and joint, but has zero visibility into brain trauma.
Problem
The silent danger
Football unites us. Super Bowl LX drew the country together this February as a shared ritual with cultural significance. But while millions watch, the players absorb thousands of hits no one can see.
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma. There's no cure, and it can only be confirmed through autopsy after death.
A Boston University study found CTE in 345 of 376 former NFL players examined. That's over 9 in 10. It isn't caused by one dramatic concussion, but by thousands of smaller sub-concussive hits that happen every play, practice, and drill.
The evidence gap
- Doctors Primary user
Suspect damage but can't prove it. They need real-time brain data to justify game-altering calls. - Players Secondary user
Hide symptoms to protect roster spots. They live inside the damage without being able to see it. - Coaches
See players who pass protocols and appear fine.
Our North Star
How do we stop diagnosing CTE at autopsy and start detecting in life?
Process
Designing the missing instrument
Killing the universal device
Our first instinct was to design a catch-all device. CTE shows up in soccer, gymnastics, boxing, and beyond, so why not build a wearable for every high-risk sport?
We quickly scratched that idea. In a 4-day sprint judged on how memorable a pitch is, breadth would cost us depth. Football is synonymous with CTE in the public imagination, and universal messaging would have diluted storytelling.
Where does the sensor live?
Forehead adhesive patch
Too wide application and sci-fi.
Wrist and limb wearables
Felt too indirect.
Integrated into the helmet
Localized to where the damage happens.
Narrowing the user
We debated who the dashboard was even for. Players? Coaches? Family? We narrowed to one primary user, sideline medical staff, because an unspecialized, generic tool is useless in high stakes moments.
Final Product
NeuraLyfe: making the invisible visible
The Halo
The Halo is a multi-modal sensor wearable that integrates discreetly into existing helmets. We 3D-modeled it and printed a physical prototype to bring it to life.
EEG Sensors
Map brain activity and neural connectivity.
Biomarker Bands
Track p-Tau 217, NfL, and GFAP to form a CTE Progression Index.
Impact Camera
Verifies hits and reconstructs plays.
A note on the science: p-Tau 217, NfL, and GFAP are biomarkers individually linked to neurodegenerative disease in published research. The speculative part is combining them as a real-time CTE Progression Index.
The Interface
Roster view
Who needs attention?
Every active player appears as a card, sorted by medical urgency. Each card shows CTE stage, progression trend, and cumulative impacts.
Brain view
What's happening?
A 3D wireframe brain, color-coded by region: blue for healthy tissue, amber for early degeneration, red for active degeneration. A season timeline lets users scrub through the weeks and flag progression.
Impact replay
What caused it?
The timeline overlays severity, timestamp, and affected brain region onto game footage, tying every biomarker spike back to the play that caused it.
Protocol & Safeguards
Without a decision rule, doctors still carry the political weight of pulling a player. Our protocol is designed to make the call for them.
Our system aims to protect players at every level, with all data belonging to them.
Player Protection
Teams receive real-time alerts, and the NeuraLyfe record travels with the player across teams and into retirement.
System Accountability
Player removals notify all necessary parties and nobody can suppress the alert.
Impact
First place.
NeuraLyfe won and took home the grand prize. Finding out mid-class showcase surrounded by cheering peers, became one of my proudest moments ever.
Judges distinguished NeuraLyfe for its slides, video, storytelling, and especially prototype, which we 3D-printed to bring the concept to life.
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Teams
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Participants
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Grand prize
Reflections
Parallel prompting: polish vs. cohesion
Our breakthrough was splitting the interface into three flows and prompting Figma Make in parallel. This process gave us more refined outputs under a strict time-constraint, but it also cost us cohesion visually. Next time, I'd build a shared component library beforehand, instead of trying to retrofit consistency after.
Emotional resonance beats topical relevance
When producing our video, the hardest problem I faced was empathy. Football is niche and CTE is abstract, yet I had to get someone who's never watched a game to care about the cause. What I underestimated was that empathy travels further than interest, and being sport-specific widened emotional reach rather than narrow it.
What's next?
The system we imagined doesn't exist yet and is purely speculative. If I continued this project, I'd redesign it around what's detectable today: longitudinal behavioral data. That's the direction BU's CTE Center is already moving in.
The bigger question is organizational. Even if the technology existed tomorrow, a profit-driven league has little incentive to adopt a system designed to pull its highest-paid assets off the field. The technology problem could be solved in ten years. The accountability problem has been unsolved for fifty. NeuraLyfe wasn't going to single-handedly fix that, but it was an attempt to imagine what it would look like if someone tried.
thanks for reading (✿・‿・)ノ゛
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