CUSTOM
WEARABLE
ELECTRONICS
Ultra-low-power hardware, body-worn RF, multi-modal biometric sensing, and companion app development — consumer to clinical to combat.
The Engineering Problem
Wearable Electronics Is a Different Engineering Problem
Size determines whether someone actually wears the device all day. Every millimeter of PCB and every gram of weight is a wearability decision — miniaturization here gates whether the product reaches the market at all.
A device that dies in 18 hours sits on a nightstand. Battery life must be designed at the architecture phase — SoC modes, sensor duty cycles, and BLE intervals co-optimized before firmware is written, or the problem surfaces at DVT.
A wearable that drops its Bluetooth connection during movement defeats its purpose. Antenna placement, connection parameters, and link-layer retransmission behave differently on a wrist than on a bench — we test RF performance in motion, not just on a fixture.
Human tissue fundamentally changes antenna impedance and radiation patterns — what works on a bench fails on an arm. We characterize detuning against a phantom body model before committing to a layout, not after the first DVT build fails RSSI testing.
ECG and EMG signals live in a noise environment the body itself creates — motion artifacts, impedance variation, powerline interference, and muscle crosstalk. Signal conditioning and DSP must treat the body as an active noise source, not a passive emitter.
Skin-contact materials carry biocompatibility, sweat resistance, and chemical migration requirements unique to wearables. ISO 10993 governs healthcare applications; REACH governs consumer — material selection is a regulatory decision, not a mechanical one.
Wrist flexion, sweat ingress, thermal cycling, and daily drops eliminate component classes that work fine in handheld electronics. Rigid-flex qualification, conformal coating, and IP-rated enclosure design must be scoped at the architecture phase, not retrofitted.
Seven-day life from a 180 mAh cell requires a state machine coordinating every subsystem with tick-level precision. Our firmware teams have shipped products at <15 μA average draw in continuous monitoring mode.
FCC Part 15, CE RED, and IC RSS-247 all require body-worn RF testing and SAR measurement against a liquid phantom — not just free-space. Antenna design, shielding, and regulatory strategy must be co-designed from the start to avoid late-stage failures.
Wrist and patch form factors require rigid-flex PCBs with DFM constraints absent in rigid boards — bend radius limits, coverlay selection, impedance continuity through flex-to-rigid transitions. We qualify stackups through 10,000-cycle bend testing before production release.
Wearable Device Categories We Build
Body-worn electronics across every form factor, vertical, and complexity level.
Consumer Wearables
Healthcare & Clinical Wearables
Industrial Worker Safety Wearables
Military & Defense Wearables
Sports Performance Wearables
Enterprise Smart Badges
Pediatric & Infant Monitoring
Pet & Animal Wearables
Rehabilitation & Recovery
Neuro & EEG Devices
Electronics Architecture
SoC selection, PMIC integration, and battery management optimized for wearable power envelopes — from coin-cell to rechargeable flex-battery systems.
Sensor Integration
Full biometric sensor suite — PPG, ECG, EMG, EDA, IMU, barometer, SpO2 — with calibration routines and sensor fusion algorithms for accurate health metrics.
Wireless & RF Engineering
BLE 5.x, ANT+, LTE-M, UWB, and NFC integration with body-worn antenna design accounting for tissue detuning, SAR measurement, and FCC/CE certification support.
Ultra-Low-Power Firmware
Power state machines achieving <10 μA average in monitoring modes via sensor duty cycling, adaptive BLE intervals, and tick-precise subsystem coordination.
Industrial Design Collaboration
Rigid-flex PCB layout for wearable form factors, IP-rated enclosure DFM, skin-contact material selection, and display/haptic integration — handled in-house alongside electronics.
Companion App Development
iOS and Android companion apps with custom BLE GATT profiles, background sync, data visualization, and cloud API integration.
Certification Support
FCC/ISED, CE RED, IC RSS-247, IEC 62133 battery safety, IP67/68 environmental, and EN 300 328 BLE conformance — managed from pre-compliance through final submission.
Manufacturing Readiness
Production test fixture design, automated BLE functional verification, battery cell matching, board-level cosmetic inspection criteria, and NPI support.
Chipsets & Platforms
Platforms & Chipsets
Tested silicon and proven stacks — no experimental platform dependencies.
Consumer & Healthcare Wearables
From Apple Watch competitors to FDA-cleared patient monitoring patches — the full range of body-worn sensing.
PPG connects consumer fitness wearables and clinical patient monitors — the difference is accuracy requirement and regulatory classification. We've designed for both ends of that spectrum and know exactly when a consumer architecture can meet clinical intent and when it cannot.
Industrial, Military & Sports Wearables
When the wearable has to work in an explosion-proof zone, at the peak of a mountain, or on a soldier under fire.
Petroleum refinery wearables must meet IECEx intrinsic safety requirements — stored energy below the minimum ignition energy of the target gas mixture — on top of IP67 and -40°C to +70°C operating range. Military adds MIL-STD-810H and secure key management; sports performance adds hardware-timestamped timing at ±0.5 ms accuracy. We've shipped certified hardware in all three categories.
Why Wearable Companies Choose Ankh Innovations
Full-Stack Wearable Team
Hardware, firmware, companion app, and certification under one team — no hand-offs between embedded and app teams, no broken protocol negotiations.
Body-Worn RF Expertise
Body-worn antenna placement is a fundamentally different problem from bench PCB design. We've characterized tissue detuning, designed around it, and built matching networks that hold up through real-world motion and clothing layers.
Power Co-Design from Day One
Power budgets are designed before component selection — battery size, SoC modes, sensor duty cycles, and BLE intervals co-optimized from architecture. Battery life problems surface at DVT only when this step is skipped.
Five Verticals, One Engineering Team
Five verticals share most of their engineering problems but diverge sharply on compliance, ruggedization, and certification. We've solved that divergence across all five — FDA, IECEx, and MIL-STD-810 included.
Continuous Cardiac Monitoring Patch
A cardiac monitoring company needed a single-lead, lead-II ECG patch — 14-day life, disposable, sub-1 mm thick — for the ambulatory cardiac market with FDA 510(k) clearance against a Holter predicate.
Hybrid rigid-flex with ADS1292R ECG front end, right-leg drive at >80 dB CMRR, accelerometer-coupled motion rejection, and nRF52840 BLE SoC. Power state machine achieved 12 μA average — 14.5-day operation from 100 mAh. IEC 62304 Class B lifecycle applied throughout.
- 14.5-day continuous operation demonstrated on bench and wear trial
- ECG signal quality exceeding AAMI EC11 amplitude accuracy requirements
- BLE data transmission with 99.3% uplink success rate in hospital RF environment
- 510(k) cleared in 13 months from architecture freeze
Oil & Gas Lone-Worker Safety Wearable
A safety technology company needed an IECEx-certified lone-worker wearable for petroleum refineries — H2S/LEL monitoring, fall detection, man-down alarm, and LTE-M GPS reporting on a single 3-year battery charge.
Intrinsically safe design with zener-diode barrier energy limiting, electrochemical H2S interface with drift compensation, and nRF9160 LTE-M/GPS. Aggressive power management — 4 Hz sensor sampling, GPS on movement only, LTE-M heartbeat every 10 min — meets IP67 and IECEx Ex ia IIC T4 Ga.
- IECEx certification achieved in first submission cycle
- 38-month battery life demonstrated in accelerated life testing
- Fall detection false alarm rate <0.1 per shift in field trials
- Real-time GPS location within 6 m accuracy in open environments
Engineering Your Wearable Device?
From ultra-low-power hardware to body-worn RF to companion app — we build wearable electronics end-to-end.
Quote Your Wearable Project