Project Sanctuary — pitch lab

Key terms

Read this once, then use the simulator below. Vocabulary matches the full Project Sanctuary narrative and the three architecture pillars on the overview page.

Project Sanctuary

A product concept for a wrist companion that watches for signs your nervous system is sliding toward stress, then offers short, personalized actions to help you settle—not therapy and not a diagnosis, but timely support in the moment. A future native app would do the sensitive work on the device; this site explains the idea and runs a harmless simulation.

Emotional co-regulation

You and a tool share the job of steadying your state: the tool notices patterns and suggests the next small step; you choose what to follow. The goal is partnership with your own attention, not the tool “fixing” you.

Autonomic stress drift

Your autonomic nervous system runs heart rate, breathing, sweat, and fight-or-flight responses mostly without conscious effort. “Drift” here means those signals are trending toward a more stressed pattern compared to your personal baseline—not a medical label, just the direction the software would care about.

Soothe sequence

A short chain of actions the concept might offer in one episode—for example exhale pacing, a bounded walk, softer environment, or a one-line reframe—chosen so the sequence feels doable, not overwhelming.

Private sensing

Heart variability, heart rate, motion, and similar signals are used on-device to infer “something changed,” without treating the watch as a reason to ship raw biometric traces to the cloud for the core experience.

On-device intelligence

Small models and rules running on the watch classify how intense the moment looks and what class of response might fit (calm down, channel energy, or reframe)—always subordinate to your consent and attention.

Intervention orchestration

Turning a decision into a felt moment: one clear notification or haptic, optional links to music, home scenes, or breathing—timed and sequenced so support shows up when useful and stays quiet when you are already recovering.

Soothe profile quiz

A four-question flow at /projects/sanctuary/quiz that suggests Sensory seeker, Sensory avoider, or Mixed / context. You must finish it before the pitch lab simulator runs; completing it stores a small local flag in your browser until you retake the quiz or clear site data. Same spirit as blueprint onboarding—conversation starter, not a diagnosis.

Autonomic load (slider on this page)

A single 0–100 stand-in for “how heavy does this moment feel?” It is not your real heart rate or HRV. It lets you and a partner rehearse how different intensities change the suggested response.

Soothe profile (seeker / avoider / mixed)

A lightweight personalization axis from the blueprint: some people regulate better by reducing input (avoider), some by safe activation (seeker), and some need a tiny cognitive step before either path (mixed). The pitch lab uses it to swap example copy—not a clinical assessment.

Trajectory (rising / stable / recovering)

Whether the simulated moment is getting worse, holding, or coming down. A real build would infer this from recent signal history; here you pick it so you can see why the concept would avoid nagging during recovery.

Suggested routing

Which family of response the demo highlights next—hold steady, down-regulate, activate, or cognitive shift—based only on the sliders and buttons you set. In a product, similar routing would run locally after real sensing.

Architecture chips (sensing / intelligence / orchestration)

Which parts of the three-layer design this moment stresses in the story: collecting signal privately, deciding what kind of help fits, or delivering the intervention through native surfaces.