Reconnecting with your own heartbeat through a wearable bag
Tokyo-born creative studio Konel brought a wearable bag to Milan Design Week 2026 to change how wellness devices work, by starting to listen to the body first.
Wellness technology can often be intimidating; a foreign object that watches you, scores you, and presents you with complex information to process, more graphs, more alerts layered on top of the stress that prompted you to buy it in the first place. Konel, a creative studio based in Japan, New York, and Milan, has spent several years building projects that work in the opposite direction.
Their latest, Pulse Pack, premiered as a solo exhibition during Fuorisalone 2026 in Via Palermo 11. The object is a wearable bag that reads your heartbeat in real time and responds with a physical vibration at exactly half that frequency. Unlike most similar devices, the product asks nothing of you; it does not notify, prompt or suggest, but simply acts and allows your nervous system to react back.
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The science underpinning this is called entrainment, a phenomenon where the body’s own rhythms synchronise with a steady external stimulus when that stimulus is slower and more regular than the body’s current state. We talked with Mitsuyo Demura, CEO and Project Designer, and Ryusei Sato, Product Designer and Project Manager, to take a deeper look into the project.
Where did the idea for Pulse Pack initially come from?
Mitsuyo Demura (CEO / Project Designer at Konel):
“The starting point was a simple, personal experience: while relaxing in a sauna, hearing my own heartbeat loudly in my ears guided me into an even deeper state of relaxation. Following our previous projects like “ZZZN”, a sleep apparel system where we explored the relationship between the body, biological rhythms, and everyday objects, the idea of treating the “heartbeat” both as a material and an experience emerged very naturally.
A pulse is something everyone constantly carries with them, continuously changing in response to emotions, movement, and stress. Yet, in our interactions with everyday objects, its presence is almost completely invisible. Pulse Pack began as an attempt to make this invisible rhythm tangible. What changes when a product synchronises with your heartbeat and quietly pulses at half that rhythm? This setting of “half the rhythm” was derived from the empirical knowledge our development team gained through repeatedly experiencing prototypes, discovering it to be the most physically comforting BPM. Above all, we wanted to use this prototype to verify if we could create a moment for people to reflect on themselves within their busy daily lives.”
During Milan Design Week, how did people react in their interactions with the product?
Ryusei Sato (Product Designer & Project Manager at Konel):
“We received many deeply resonant reactions. Since Pulse Pack is a product that transmits vibrations directly to the body, images and videos cannot fully convey the experience. The directness of feeling it the moment you wear it—even before any verbal explanation—was the most powerful aspect of the exhibition.
Even those who had read about it online beforehand were often surprised by the actual sensation when they put it on. Some people moved their bodies on the spot to see how their pulse would change, while others took out their smartwatches to compare the numbers in real time. These curious, instinctive, and highly physical reactions perfectly aligned with what we had intended.“
“What was most striking was how quickly many people moved past the “What is this?” phase and transitioned into pure curiosity. While speculative objects can sometimes create a sense of conceptual distance, the physical nature of Pulse Pack seemed to dissolve that distance almost instantly. Rather than understanding the object through explanation, they understood it through their own bodies. From there, they naturally began to brainstorm ideas and imagine various ways it could be utilised in the future.”
Despite being a deeply sensorial discipline, design is still very intellectualised, and during exhibitions time is often spent talking, explaining, reasoning. The opportunity to be able to understand a design through such a visceral physical experience is refreshing, especially to exhausted visitors. The quality of a design object that explains itself through sensation rather than information is distinctive, but also what makes it difficult to evaluate from the outside as a prototype.
Regardless of personal experience, Pulse Pack is changing the terms of the conversation around what wearable technology can do. The market for wellness devices has largely settled into treating the body as a machine, as a data source to be tracked and optimised. Konel’s position is that the body already knows things worth listening to, and devices should work with its natural rhythms instead of attacking them.
