About Stop Biting

The founder's story

I'm Igor Gazivoda, a software developer. I bit my nails for over 20 years — constantly, automatically, without noticing until the damage was already done. I tried everything: bitter polish, reminder bands, sheer willpower. They all failed the same way, because the habit is automatic and happens below the threshold of conscious awareness.

When I read the research on Habit Reversal Training, I understood why everything else had failed. HRT's core insight is that awareness is the bottleneck — you can't interrupt a habit you don't know is happening. I had a webcam, I knew how to code, and I knew MediaPipe could run hand tracking on-device. So I built the awareness component — the part of HRT that is hardest to do alone.

What Stop Biting does

Stop Biting uses your computer's webcam and Google's MediaPipe framework — compiled to WebAssembly and running entirely in your browser — to detect when your hand moves toward your mouth. When it does, an audible alarm fires. That alarm is the external awareness signal HRT research identifies as the most critical component of treatment. The app also logs each detection with a timestamp, so you can see your actual biting frequency — not your estimated frequency.

Privacy: the non-negotiable

All video processing runs in WebAssembly on your device. Nothing is transmitted — not frames, not detections, not metadata. You can disconnect your internet connection after the app loads and it will function identically. The incident log is stored locally, and there are no analytics on how you use the app.

The technology

Detection is built on Google MediaPipe's Hand Landmarker, which tracks 21 hand landmarks in real time at 30fps. Mouth proximity detection compares hand landmark coordinates to facial landmark coordinates in each frame. The desktop apps (macOS and Windows) are Electron wrappers around the same web app with system-tray background running. Read the full explanation at how it works.