Product Review - The Keen bracelet from HabitAware

I'm going to start a new series of reviews on products and services for trichotillomania.

If you don't know what trichotillomania is, I'm not going into detail  - it’s a condition where you have an uncontrollable urge to pull your hair out, strand by strand. I'll go into detail about my trich experiences in a future post, but for now I'm going to just review some of the items that have been useful for me.

OK, so what is the Keen? Its a bracelet that looks much like a fitness tracker, but what it does is recognise when you are pulling, and give you a little vibration to bring your unconscious pulling action into your conscious mind, so you can break the habit.

So how does it work? Basically you 'train' your band to recognise the movement that you're looking for (say pulling your hair on your crown, your eyebrows, or wherever) and then you get a small vibration when it picks up this movement. It is this vibration that aims to take the unconscious motion of pulling back into your conscious mind and stop the pulling. If you are caught in the motion, this allows you to bring your mindfulness to the hands pulling, and press a small button on the device, which records the amount of times you did the 'activity'. You can track your progress, using a bluetooth connection to a smartphone app.

I have been waiting for this for a long time - the media campaign launched in May 2016 with preorders opening then, and like lots of people I ordered mine - one for each wrist. I was hoping to have them by December, so I could have improve

d hair coverage for my wedding in February - unfortunately due to a variety of issues there were delays with the shipment until April this year.

Something that makes a big difference is that Keen was invented by Aneela Idnani Kumar, a trichster herself, and it really shows in the design and the website. There is genuine compassion and inside knowledge in the fabric of this product. This makes a real difference as while Keen isn't backed up by scientific research, there is certainly a precedent - Aneela herself has used a prototype to stop pulling her eyebrows, and models out her success in stopping pulling.

The device costs between USD $129 - $179 for one bracelet, but if you pull with both your hands you'll probably need two, so its not cheap, although there is nothing like it on the market. The Pavlok bracelet is the closest you'll come to it, but Pavlok doesn't identify your pulling motion in the moment, uses negative reinforcement rather than neutral reinforcement and costs around USD $179-$199.

When you open Keen you'll see the bracelet, the mini-USB charger and the studs used to hold the bracelet together - with the option of a L and R stud which is important if you have two bracelets like I do. The bracelet takes about two hours to charge - HabitAware recommend you charge it each night as there's just one day of charge in them, but this is easy enough to achieve.

The band itself is quite well designed - it is comfortable and looks like other body monitoring wristbands on the market as you can see next to my Fitbit Flex here. However, after being so used to the sturdiness of the Fitbit bands, I found the rubber holding the Keen a little flimsy - I wonder how well it would cope with a child playing in the mud at school. Also, it was quite itchy on my skin on a humid day - the sweat on my wrist combined with the multiple stud holes made it quite uncomfortable and I had to take it off.

Training the device is a bit fiddly - while actually training the device can be done in about sixty seconds, it took a while of trial and error to find the right motion that will pick up when you are pulling, but won't ping off with false positives every thirty seconds. I found myself having to create and delete trained motions a few times before I got something that was easy to cope with, as I was getting false positives every time I picked up my phone. Fortunately you can tweak the sensitivity of the device, so its not going off all the time.  

A screenshot of the app

The app is easy to navigate and simple to use. Its not something that you would feel ashamed in using in front of your friends, and if you want Keen for a child, you don't need to constantly back the bracelet up to the phone all day. I'm data driven, so I would prefer to have the option of exporting your history or being able to see your progress over the past, but its fine for a brand new product.

The actual vibration when you are pulling is the real key to the success of this product - it brings your attention to the pulling before you do it, and you can recognise it, think about where you are, what has triggered it, and then stop the action. It's great for bringing your conscious mind to your unconscious actions and teaching you to retrain your brain to do something else with that impulse.

Unfortunately, it wasn't picking up my hair pulling every time, but even when it didn't go off, I found just wearing the band to be a reminder, which was helpful. The false positives drove me a little bit nuts though, particularly when I was using my phone or typing at work.

Overall, though, it’s a great product. Considering this is the first iteration of the Keen, there has been a lot of thought and effort put into it by the team and it really did help me in recognising my pulling behaviours in the moment. I'd like to see if there's some suggestions they can bring towards sensory 'rewards' that we can use instead of hair pulling in the moment as well, but there's some great progress here.

I would give the Keen 8/10 - it is definitely the only product of its kind, and I'm hopeful that they will be able to further develop the product. Its a wonderful idea that's helping me already to be mindful of my pulling without making me feel ashamed. 

Pros:

• First bracelet of its kind
• For trichsters, by trichsters
• Gives feedback without judgement
• Helps to you bring your attention to your pulling behaviours and triggers
• App and bracelet do not look like they are for trichotillomania

Cons:

• Band can get itchy
• Training can take a little while to perfect
• False positives are annoying
• App history only stores 7 days of data
• Expensive (particularly if you need two).

How wearing a fitness tracker made my house tidier and improved my relationship

My partner was quite surprised when I asked for a fitness tracker for my birthday. For those who aren't in the know, a fitness tracker is a super awesome pedometer which (for me) does things like track my sleep as well as how many steps I've done.

After a few days of me counting steps, and him reading about other friends who have found wearing a tracker being really helpful for them to be aware of how much physical activity they're doing. Or not. So a few weeks later, when he saw a special on them he jumped on it.

Then it was on like Donkey Kong. The program that we use allowed us to set little challenges "who can do the most steps over the weekend" "Who can do the most steps over the working week?". Suddenly we had gone from a boring and virtuous system where we tried to better ourselves to a cheeky and exciting battle for stepping glory. There was trash talking, cheering for each other and lots of fun.

Because he works nights and I work days, we often don't spend much time in the same room over the week, so having a little chat room in our fitness tracker app which allowed us to trash talk each other as I walked to the train station on my morning commute, or cheer as he made the most of his morning to get another thousand steps. We felt like we were closer together, even though we were in different places.

I stopped walking to the nearest train station, and started walking to one a little further away. I would bring my lunch to work and then spend ten minutes of my lunchbreak walking around the block.

He decided he needed to step it up a notch too and soon we were walking places we would normally have driven – to the café for brunch, to the supermarket for a loaf of bread… We were becoming unstoppable.

However, it was the housework that is really a surprise. My partner and I are both, well, kinda slobs. Housework is not a priority for us, although we certainly do enjoy living in a tidy house, often we find the motivation to keep it that way just… difficult. But right now, the dishes are done, the clothes are folded and in the cupboard and the coffee table is no longer the snowdrift of opened and unactioned correspondence that it always seems to be.

The reason for this is... well, housework accrues steps. In order to earn extra steps, housework has become something of a game too. Let me explain. We’ve been able to ascertain that cooking food accrues a decent amount of steps (around 500 per meal). Now if my partner’s cooking, that means I need to catch up with 500 additional steps. So I’d go into the lounge room and tidy all the bits and pieces off the coffee table. Or spot the unfolded pile of clean laundry in the basket and fold it and put it away. My partner, of course, would spot this, and say that I was ‘stealing steps’ which meant that he would have to do additional steps, by doing other small chores around the house.

The air of cheeky competition in the air is palpable. But the part that has improved our relationship the best was how… appreciated we are both feeling right now.

When you come home from work, and the house is tidier than when you left it, I feel grateful for it.

When I jump up and do the dishes after dinner, instead of leaving them for my partner to do the next morning, he feels cherished and relieved. He does other work instead – folding laundry or tidying the lounge room.

Its amazing how one small positive change can have unexpected flow on effects.