Your hands wander. Mooo notices.
Mooo is a calm iPhone app for the moments your hands drift to your face while you work, study, read or watch a film. This is also our blog about the habit: what it is, why it happens and what the studies say.
face touches an hour, on average, among 26 students filmed during a lecture.
Kwok, Gralton and McLaws, American Journal of Infection Control, 2015. Read the study
How Mooo works
Prop up your phone
Stand it on your desk, start a session and get back to what you were doing.
Your hand drifts
When your hand stays near your face for a moment, to bite a nail, twirl your hair or rest on your cheek, Mooo sees it.
A cowbell rings
The cows look up and a soft bell rings. You notice, and that's all. A gentle nudge, nothing more.
From the blog
Can a reminder stop you touching your face?
Reminder evidence is mixed. A classroom message had no clear effect. In 8 adults, two vibrating bracelets lowered face touching and one did not.
Hair twirling in adults: what we know about the habit
Very little. PubMed has 9 records for hair twirling, and only one is a study built around it, in one young child. Here is what that leaves.
How long does it take to break a habit?
We found no timing data for losing a habit. The 18 to 254 day range comes from people forming a new one, which is a different question.
How often do people touch their face?
Two studies counted 10 and 23 face touches an hour. Here is who was watched, what was counted, and why your own number may be far from either.
How to stop biting your nails as an adult
What has been tested for adult nail biting, from a two-hour habit method to bitter polish, plus steps you can try today.
What the camera sees stays on your phone
Mooo looks for one thing: a hand near a face. All of it happens on your phone with Apple's Vision framework.
- No video is recorded or saved.
- Nothing from the camera is uploaded.
- You can see the camera view next to the clock at any time.