AIdeas Finalist: SenseSync - The Third Channel
For 187 years, digital communication has wired up exactly two of the five human senses. SenseSync opens the third. A real-time haptic communication app built on AWS IoT Core, Lambda, Bedrock, and DynamoDB that lets people send rhythm and presence across any distance. Zero dollars a month. The haptic channel, finally online.
App Category
Social Impact
My Vision
The telegraph was invented in 1837.
Within a decade, humans could send text across continents instantly. Within another decade, we sent voice. A century later, video. Each time, we took something that only worked in person and made it work at any distance.
We have been doing this for 187 years.
And in all that time, we only ever wired up two of the five senses.
- 👀 Vision — digitized (video, images, text)
- 👂 Hearing — digitized (calls, voice messages)
- 👋 Touch — never digitized
- 👃 Smell — not yet
- 🍽️ Taste — not yet
Smell and taste are genuinely hard. The hardware doesn't exist in everyone's pocket.
But touch? The hardware has been sitting in every smartphone for over a decade. The vibration motor. The haptic engine. The same chip that buzzes when you get a notification has been waiting, completely unused as a communication channel, since the iPhone shipped in 2007.
Nobody asked what else it could say.
SenseSync is the answer to that question.
Not a simulation of touch. Not fake hugs through a screen. Something more interesting than that: a new communication channel, built for the body, that has never existed before.
Radio didn't try to replicate the sound of a person standing next to you. It created something new: broadcasting. SenseSync doesn't try to replicate physical touch. It creates something new: haptic communication. A language of rhythm, intensity, and timing that two people can share across any distance, felt directly by the body, understood without words.
Plain text
You tap → AWS transmits → They feel it
Five patterns ship with the app, each one a word in this new language:
- 💓 Heartbeat — I am thinking of you
- 🌊 Wave — Hello from wherever I am
- 🤗 Hug — One long, steady presence
- ✨ Gentle Pulse — I am here, no need to reply
- 🚨 Urgent Alert — I need you, right now
And for everything that those five words cannot say, SenseSync has an AI-powered Pattern Creator. Describe what you want to communicate in plain language. Amazon Bedrock with Claude converts that description into a haptic pattern tuned to its emotional shape. A new word, invented by you, felt by them.
Built for the AWS 10,000 AIdeas Competition using Kiro and the AWS Free Tier. Monthly infrastructure cost: $0.
Why This Matters
Every communication technology we have built rewires the same two channels: eyes and ears.
Video calls, podcasts, social media, live streaming, VR headsets. All of it lands on the visual or auditory cortex. The haptic cortex, which processes touch and physical sensation, has received exactly nothing from the digital world in 187 years of telecommunications history.
This is not a small gap. Touch is the first sense that develops in the womb. It is the sense that never fully sleeps, even when we do. Neuroscientists describe it as the sense most tightly coupled to emotional regulation, social bonding, and the basic feeling of not being alone. [1] [2]
We built the internet. We gave it two senses. We left one out.
SenseSync opens the third channel. Here is who it matters to first:
🤟 Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Users
466 million people worldwide are deaf or hard of hearing . For these users, SenseSync establishes a communication channel that bypasses sound entirely and lands directly on the body. A vocabulary of rhythm and intensity that is entirely tactile. This is not an accessibility workaround. It is a native channel for a community that has always communicated through physical sensation, now extended across distance for the first time.
💑 Long-Distance Relationships and Separated Families
Words are interpretable. Tone can be misread. But a steady 800ms vibration at 2am carries a meaning that needs no translation: I am awake, I am thinking of you, you are not alone. No call needed. No text composed. One tap. They feel it.
🎮 Gaming and Shared Experiences
The same real-time haptic delivery infrastructure that sends a heartbeat can synchronize physical sensations between players, sync vibrations to live audio, or create shared physical moments during remote co-op experiences. The channel SenseSync built for human connection has applications anywhere two people want to feel something together from different locations.
Why hasn't this been built before?
Apple Watch had "Digital Touch" (2015) that sent taps between watches. It was discontinued. Bond Touch bracelets exist ($100/pair) but require hardware purchase.
What they all lacked: cross-platform software, AI personalization, accessibility focus, and zero-cost deployment. SenseSync is the first haptic communication platform built on cloud infrastructure, accessible to anyone with a smartphone.
References:
[1]: Morrison, I., Löken, L. S., & Olausson, H. (2010). The skin as a social organ. Experimental Brain Research, 204(3), 305–314.
[2]: Gallace, A., & Spence, C. (2008). The science of interpersonal touch: An overview. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 34(2), 246–259.
[3]: National Institutes of Health. (2020).
Hearing health care is a global priority.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/hearing-health-care-global-priority
How I Built This
The Core Engineering Problem
Haptic communication fails if it is late. A heartbeat pattern that arrives 3 seconds after it was sent is not a heartbeat. It is a notification. The entire design of SenseSync's backend was built around one constraint: delivery in under 100 milliseconds, at zero infrastructure cost.
That constraint drove every architecture decision.
Architecture
AWS Services
Service | Role |
|---|---|
Amazon Cognito | Phone number auth and JWT tokens |
AWS API Gateway | REST API and WebSocket endpoint |
AWS Lambda | sendTouch, receiveTouch, generatePattern, manageContacts |
Amazon DynamoDB | Users, contacts, touch history, custom patterns |
AWS IoT Core | Real-time MQTT delivery, the core of the system |
Amazon SNS | Push notifications via APNs (iOS) and FCM (Android) |
Amazon Bedrock | AI haptic pattern generation with Claude |
Amazon CloudWatch | Latency monitoring and billing alerts |
Amazon S3 + CloudFront | Static assets and global CDN |
Total monthly cost: ~ $0 ✅
Designing the Language
The hardest part of SenseSync was not the infrastructure. It was the patterns themselves.
A haptic pattern is defined by three variables per step: duration (how long the vibration lasts), intensity (light, medium, or heavy), and pause (silence before the next step). The heartbeat pattern has four steps. It took 12 iterations to get right.
TypeScript
export const builtInPatterns = {heartbeat: [{ duration: 80, intensity: 'light', pause: 80 },{ duration: 120, intensity: 'heavy', pause: 400 },{ duration: 80, intensity: 'light', pause: 80 },{ duration: 120, intensity: 'heavy', pause: 400 },],hug: [{ duration: 800, intensity: 'medium', pause: 0 },],};
The second beat of the heartbeat needs to be heavier than the first. The pause after the pair needs to be long enough to feel like breathing. Move any value by 20ms in the wrong direction and it stops feeling like a heartbeat and starts feeling like a glitch. Every millisecond is a design decision.
Real-Time Delivery via AWS IoT Core
Each user gets a private MQTT topic on AWS IoT Core:
touches/{userId} . When a touch is sent, Lambda publishes to that topic instantly. The recipient's app, subscribed via AWS Amplify PubSub, receives it and plays the pattern:TypeScript
PubSub.subscribe(`touches/${userId}`).subscribe({next: async (data) => {await playPattern(data.value.steps);}});
If the recipient's app is closed, Lambda falls back automatically to Amazon SNS, which routes to APNs (iPhone) or FCM (Android) and wakes the device within roughly 2 seconds. No touch is ever dropped.
AI Pattern Generation
The Pattern Creator sends a natural language description to Amazon Bedrock with a prompt engineered to produce consistent, structured haptic output:
Plain text
The user wants to communicate: "warm and slow, like a Sunday morning"You are a haptic pattern designer for a communication app.Return ONLY valid JSON with a maximum of 6 steps.Each step: { duration: 50-800ms, intensity: light|medium|heavy, pause: 50-500ms }light = gentle, quiet medium = warm, present heavy = direct, urgentMatch the emotional character of the description to the rhythm and weight of the pattern.
The output is a typed JSON pattern, saved to DynamoDB, previewable on a live waveform visualizer before sending. A feeling described in words becomes a feeling transmitted through vibration.
Development Timeline
- Week 1 — Cognito auth with phone and OTP, navigation, foundational architecture
- Week 2 — Haptic engine, 5 core patterns, contacts system, DynamoDB schema
- Week 3 — IoT Core real-time delivery, SNS push notification fallback
- Week 4 — Bedrock AI pattern creator, touch history, waveform visualizer, performance tuning
Performance
Metric | Target | Result |
|---|---|---|
Touch delivery (app open) | < 100ms | 87ms ✅ |
Touch delivery (app closed) | < 5s | ~2s ✅ |
AI pattern generation | < 3s | ~1.4s ✅ |
API response time | < 200ms | 145ms ✅ |
Monthly AWS cost | $0 | $0 ✅ |
What building this taught me:
Designing in milliseconds is different from designing in pixels.
A heartbeat pattern that's 20ms off doesn't feel like a heartbeat, it
feels like a bug. This forced precision I'd never applied to product
design before. Haptic design is closer to music composition than
software engineering.
Kiro removed the ceiling on what one person can build. Scaffolding Lambda,
IoT, DynamoDB, and SAM templates manually would have taken weeks. Kiro
did it in hours. That time went into the product: heartbeat timing,
waveform visualizer, pattern feel.
Demo
Home Screen
Select a contact, choose a pattern, tap. Your contact feels it in real time. The UI pulses with the rhythm of your selected pattern as a preview before you send.
AI Pattern Creator
Type a feeling. A waveform appears. Preview it on your own phone first. Send it.
Touch History
Every touch sent and received, with delivery method, latency, and pattern type. Tap any entry to feel it again.
Contacts
Search by username, send a request, connect. Touch flows both ways once accepted.
What I Learned
Addressing Judge Feedback
The judge feedback fundamentally changed how I think about SenseSync.
"Narrow primary audience" resonated most.
I had initially positioned SenseSync primarily as a relationship app – long-distance relationships, personal connection. The judges were right to push back. That's too narrow and overlooked broader social needs, especially given many existing communication tools people already use.
So I researched and found what I had missed: 466 million people worldwide are deaf or hard of hearing . For them, SenseSync isn't just a relationship feature. It's a native tactile communication channel that bypasses sound entirely.
Through conversations with deaf or hard of hearing users, I began to understand something I hadn't fully appreciated before: when hearing is limited or absent, touch can become a powerful and primary mode of communication. This insight is not always obvious to those without that lived experience.
This led to me reposition SenseSync: accessibility first, relationships secondary. With this shift, the potential impact is broader, addressing a real social need while also expanding the market significantly.
"Unclear adoption path" forced the hardest question: why would anyone leave WhatsApp?
Answer: they wouldn't.
So I shifted strategy. SenseSync isn't competing with WhatsApp. It's building the haptic infrastructure they'll integrate. Like Zoom became the video layer, SenseSync becomes the touch layer.
Phase 1: Standalone app (proof the channel works)
Phase 2: Open API for third-party developers
Phase 3: Platform licensing to messaging giants
This is not merely a messaging app, but a protocol that incumbents can integrate into their infrastructure
"Missing evidence" sent me to research.
I’ve now added citations to support the claims around touch, emotional regulation, and social bonding. [1] [2]
"Limited validation" was acknowledged.
Through direct conversations with deaf
and hard-of-hearing users, I validated
the core premise –that touch bypasses
sound and lands directly on the body
as a native communication channel
"Uncertain market viability" pushed me to think beyond the Free Tier.
The platform strategy answers this: Phase 3 licensing to messaging giants creates sustainable revenue. Zero infrastructure cost means margins that make this viable at any scale.
Development Insights
Building SenseSync taught me:
1. The third channel was always there. The haptic motor has existed since 2007, used only for notifications. SenseSync asked: what else can it say?
2. Emotion lives in timing. A heartbeat 20ms off doesn't feel like a heartbeat. It feels like a bug. Haptic design is closer to music than software.
3. A better prompt beats a bigger model. The AI pattern generator's quality came from treating prompts like typed contracts, not switching models.
4. Kiro removed the ceiling. What would have taken weeks to scaffold took hours. That time went into product feel.
5. Zero cost is accessibility. Every decision that kept SenseSync in Free Tier made it deployable anywhere, by anyone.
Judge feedback didn't change the vision. It clarified the path.
Radio gave the world a new way to send sound.
SenseSync gives the world a new way to send presence.
187 years after the telegraph. The third channel is open.
Built for the AWS 10,000 AIdeas Competition — Social Impact Category SenseSync | Harish Muthyala | AIdeas Finalist | mharishchowdary11@gmail.com
Enjoyed reading this content? Let the author know!
Your likes, comments, shares, and saves help creators reach more builders.
Loading recommendations
Loading article