Why wearables are harder than they look
A wearable is three engineering problems sharing one millimeter of space. The signal has to be clean enough that the math works. The radio has to be loud enough that the phone hears it. The battery has to be small enough that the user does not feel it — and still last a day. Trade off any one of those and the product fails.
We have shipped enough wearables to know which trade-offs are negotiable and which are not. PPG window geometry is not negotiable. Connection interval is. Motion artifact rejection is a firmware-and-mechanical problem, not a firmware-only problem. Charging contact placement decides whether your reviewers complain about scratched skin.
What a wearable program covers
Industrial design
Concept, CMF, mechanism, and DFM-ready enclosure. Tuned for skin contact, signal quality, and assembly tolerance.
Hardware
Compact rigid + rigid-flex PCBs around small ARM Cortex-M MCUs, biosensor front-ends, motion IMUs, and PMIC + cell-protection circuitry.
Biosensor pipelines
PPG, SpO₂, ECG, EEG, skin temperature, accelerometer-based activity. On-device DSP to clean signals before they leave the device.
Low-power firmware
Event-driven architecture, BLE connection-parameter tuning, sensor duty cycling. Every release ends with a measured current trace.
Charging & battery
Magnetic / pogo charging contacts, wireless charging coils, cell selection, fuel-gauge integration, and safety circuits.
Companion app
iOS / Android pairing, vitals dashboards, OTA, and the small-but-critical UX details — first-time setup, lost-device recovery, family / clinician sharing.
Stack we ship in wearables
| Layer | What we ship |
|---|---|
| MCUs | Nordic nRF52832 / nRF52840 / nRF5340, STM32L4 / U5, Qualcomm QCC51xx (audio+sensors) |
| Sensors | Maxim MAX86150 / MAX30102 (PPG / SpO₂), TI ADS1299 (EEG), TI ADS129x (ECG), Bosch BMI270 IMU, thermistors and skin-temp ICs |
| Radio | BLE 5.x, NFC pairing on supported silicon |
| Power | PMIC (Nordic nPM, TI BQ), cell-protection IC, fuel gauge, Joulescope-measured budget |
| Charging | Magnetic pogo, USB-C, Qi wireless coils |
Proof — wearables we have shipped
FAQ
What kinds of wearables have you shipped?
Smart rings, smart watches, EEG headsets with audio output, ECG monitors, and insole-based monitoring devices. PPG, SpO₂, ECG, EEG (TI ADS1299), skin temperature, and activity pipelines on Nordic, Qualcomm, and STM32 silicon.
How do you achieve multi-day battery in a small wearable?
Event-driven firmware, aggressive duty cycling on radio and sensor front-ends, BLE connection-parameter tuning, and physical-design choices like cell selection and antenna efficiency. Every program ends with a measured Joulescope / PPK II current trace.
Can you do industrial design and enclosure work?
Yes. Concept, CMF, mechanism, and DFM-ready enclosure design in-house. For wearables we pay particular attention to skin contact, ingress protection, and the trade-off between signal quality and comfort.
Can you clean up a noisy PPG or ECG signal?
Yes. Most wearable biosignal problems are a combination of optical or electrode design, on-device DSP, and motion-artifact rejection. We tune all three together.
From sketch to shipped wearable, in one team
Talk to us about your wearable concept, half-built prototype, or stuck signal pipeline. 30 minutes, free, with a written follow-up in 48 hours.
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