Stress Guru
AI wellness coaching that detects stress before you ask for help.
An iOS and Apple Watch wellness app that catches the biometric signature of stress as it builds, then connects the user with an AI coach trained for their specific moment.
- AI
- iOS
- watchOS
- Flutter
- Firebase
- Apple Watch
- Mental Wellness
Three things that make Stress Guru different from every other wellness app.
Catches stress early
Heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, and sleep signals from Apple Watch feed an early-detection system. Stress patterns surface before the user has to ask for help.
Coaches grounded in clinical practice
Eight AI coach personas, each focused on a specific area. Every coaching flow was reviewed by licensed psychologists at every decision point — not just at the end.
Zero-friction sessions
Notification arrives, user taps, coaching begins. No navigation, no setup, no re-introducing yourself, just an immediate start in the moment that matters.
The Problem
Stress does not appear suddenly. It builds over days and weeks through poor sleep, broken focus, and strained relationships. By the time most people notice, it has already done damage.
Existing wellness apps respond to stress after the user reports it. Zigron wanted to build something that detects stress early — before the user has to ask for help — and then connects them with a specific AI wellness coach trained for their situation.
The product needed to work with an Apple Watch. Heart rate, sleep patterns, and biometric signals would feed the app's early-detection system. When stress was detected, the app would send a push notification. The user would tap it, and a coaching session would begin immediately. The client had a clear product vision. What they needed was an engineering team that could build it, because the technical requirements were not straightforward.
A full iOS app, a watchOS companion, and the Firebase pipeline that powers the coaching engine.
ETechViral built the complete iOS application, its watchOS companion, and the Firebase Cloud Functions backend that powers the coaching pipeline. The app launched on the App Store in August 2025 and reached version 2.0 by March 2026.
Throughout the build, licensed psychologists worked directly with the team. They reviewed coaching content, validated session flows, and checked that each coach's guidance matched real clinical practice. This was not a sign-off at the end of the project — psychologists were in the room at every stage where the app made decisions about what to say to a user in distress. The result is AI coaching content grounded in how mental wellness professionals actually work with people, not general wellness advice.
- Flutter
- Dart
- Swift
- WatchConnectivity
- Firebase Auth
- Firestore
- Cloud Functions
- Cloud Messaging
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Google Cloud
- Gemini
The iOS app
The main app is built in Flutter. It covers onboarding, profile setup, coach selection, session management, progress tracking, and subscriptions. Free users get the Anxiety Guru coach and one 15-minute session. Paid subscribers unlock all eight coaches, longer sessions, a progress dashboard, persistent memory across sessions, and 24/7 access.
Eight coach personas: Stress, anxiety, sleep, motivation, relationships, happiness, calm, and spirituality. Each is grounded in clinical practice for its area.
Continuous context: When a session starts, the coach picks up where the previous one ended. Session history, notes, and user context carry forward — the user never has to repeat themselves.
Subscription tiers: Free tier unlocks one coach and one 15-minute session. Paid tier unlocks all eight coaches, longer sessions, the progress dashboard, and persistent memory.
The watchOS companion app
A native Swift app that runs on Apple Watch and communicates with the Flutter iOS app via WatchConnectivity. It reads the user's biometric signals — HRV, resting heart rate, and sleep — and passes them to the iOS app. When stress indicators appear, the pipeline triggers a push notification that opens the right coaching session.
Biometric reading: Continuous HRV, RHR, and sleep-signal capture from HealthKit.
WatchConnectivity bridge: Real-time data sync to the iOS Flutter app, with offline queueing when the iPhone is out of range.
Trigger pipeline: Stress-pattern detection feeds a Cloud Function that picks the right coach persona and sends a targeted push notification.
Three things that made this build hard
Flutter has no watchOS support
Flutter runs on iOS, Android, web, and desktop — not watchOS. Building the companion meant writing a fully separate native Swift app and connecting it to the Flutter app through WatchConnectivity. Two codebases, kept in sync as the product evolved.
Firebase has no watchOS SDK
The watch cannot call Firebase directly — there's no supported SDK. We routed every watch-originated event through the iOS app, which then calls Firebase Cloud Functions. The Cloud Functions handle the logic: reading user state, identifying the stress pattern, selecting the right coach persona, and writing back to Firestore. The watch never touches Firebase directly.
Zero-friction notification pipeline
The push notification had to identify the user's stress pattern, select the right coach persona, send a targeted notification, and launch the correct session when tapped — all without friction. Anything more than a single tap and the user would lose the moment. The entire pipeline runs in Cloud Functions, with a watchOS escape valve for users without an iPhone in reach.
Stress Guru is live on the App Store and shipped version 2.0 in March 2026. The app supports both Apple Watch users (with continuous biometric detection) and self-reporting users without a watch, so the product is not gated by hardware. AI coaching is grounded in real clinical practice through ongoing psychologist review. Users consistently mention the same thing — the app reaches out before they realised they needed it.
Got an idea worth building?Let's ship it.
Free 30 minute discovery call. We talk through what you're building, the constraints, and whether I'm the right fit. No pitch.