Smart Jewellery

Jewellery-first wearables for health and wellbeing — digital wellness, mindfulness and biometric sensing. As co-founder and only technical founder at Vinaya (originally Kovert Designs), I built the first hardware and software working prototypes, raised funding, then hired and scaled an in-house team from scratch — leading product and engineering across hardware, embedded, product design, mobile, ML and cloud. Three generations across three form factors; all product development in-house; manufacturing tightly managed in East Asia (Taiwan, China, Thailand).

Product

A biometric and behavioural platform linking digital habits, stress, sleep and emotional wellbeing — with tools to act. Jewellery-first when wearables were still nascent: miniaturisation, custom batteries and low power, capacitive touch and haptics, difficult materials and RF, plus later R&D on a novel biometric sensing architecture with a Silicon Valley partner (custom ASIC/AFE, closed-loop DSP, on-device ML). Owned the stack end-to-end through apps, cloud insights, production and supply chain.

Key Features

• Three generations × three form factors — smart jewellery when the category was early
• Miniaturisation and flex-rigid PCB; ~40% volume reduction and large BOM cost cut across generations; custom batteries; ~15+ days typical use; long shipping-mode life
• Capacitive touch and haptic-only smart notifications (by people, apps, keywords — alerts without unlocking the phone)
• Digital wellness: screen time, phone-unlock count, disconnection tracking
• Mindfulness: guided meditation, breathing, gratitude, intentions — tied to biometrics
• Emotion logging, personal baselines, behavioural insights and correlations
• Biometric sensing R&D: PPG, ECG (touch), SpO2, GSR/EDA, temperature, HRV, respiration
• Custom low-power ASIC/AFE (Silicon Valley co-dev): analog chase / auto-zoom / clean before digitise, then wavelets + on-device ML for robust heartbeat recognition in motion and noise
• Tiny optical module (~3×3 mm); usable biometrics from noisy real-world wear on tight power and memory budgets
• Wearable RF under jewellery constraints — custom PCB antenna on flex, researched with a university spin-out in Cork
• Premium materials (e.g. zirconia ceramic); IP67; FCC, CE, Bluetooth, RoHS
• East Asia manufacturing; DFM; production test automation
• Cloud: AWS; Elixir/Erlang microservices; Elasticsearch/ELK real-time analytics and insights engine; OTA; iOS/Android — full device-to-cloud ownership

Mobile App