Michael Sinanian

Quick Snapshot

Role: Product researcher and designer on a graduate studio team
Team: Multidisciplinary student team spanning HCI, design, and engineering
Customers: Individuals looking to build healthier eating habits and public health researchers studying population-level nutrition

Concept screens summarizing the Chew personal informatics experience. — High-level concept for Chew’s paired Apple Watch and iPhone experience that passively monitors eating habits.

Mandate / Opportunity / Problem Scope

Most food tracking apps demand tedious manual entry. We set out to imagine a passive Apple Watch + iPhone experience that could monitor pace, frequency, and duration of eating to give people actionable insight without calorie logging.

Weekly insights dashboard showing eating tempo and cadence trends. — Weekly trends help people see how their eating tempo and cadence shift over time.

Apple Watch interface mockup highlighting Chew’s passive tracking metrics. — The Apple Watch UI surfaces just-in-time cues without requiring manual meal logging.

What I Led / Delivered / Highlights

Framed the behavioral problem through secondary research on U.S. nutrition trends and user interviews.
Defined a passive sensing approach using Apple’s Core Motion and Watch Connectivity frameworks to infer arm movements tied to eating.
Designed minimal watch and phone interfaces focused on two core metrics and lightweight calibration to improve accuracy.
Outlined an implementation roadmap and public-health partnership model for running population-scale studies.

Impact / Lasting Value / Takeaway

Chew demonstrated how wearables could unobtrusively coach better eating habits while generating datasets valuable for researchers, laying groundwork for future passive personal informatics tools.

Personal Informatics Prototype: Chew

Quick Snapshot

Mandate / Opportunity / Problem Scope

What I Led / Delivered / Highlights

Impact / Lasting Value / Takeaway