San Antonio—WiseWear has attracted plenty of international attention for its effort to sell a chic wearable device. Vogue, Slate, and InStyle, among other publications, wrote about the company’s Internet-connected jewelry in 2016 after WiseWear began working with a team of prominent designers, including documentary subject Iris Apfel, to bring a fashionable aesthetic to the tech accessory.
Like other wearable technology, the San Antonio company’s device tracks users’ daily steps, the calories they burn, and offers smartphone options such as calendar reminders, while also incorporating safety features, including the ability to send out emergency text messages and calls by tapping part of the bracelets. Much of the interest has been driven, however, by the company’s use of famous designers to make a wearable look attractive—in gold or palladium jewelry settings, of course.
What’s often not mentioned about WiseWear is its first product: a hearing aid that uses internal sensors and electronics to monitor gait, balance, and other health factors in elderly people. In 2015, that product received a $179,538 small business innovation research Phase 1 grant from the National Science Foundation. With that funding, the company has been developing algorithms that, when used with its technology, might be able to predict how likely it is that a person could fall and be injured, says WiseWear CEO Jerry Wilmink. The company is moving into Phase 2 of the SBIR grant, he says.
“It allows us to not only function like a hearing aid, but also pick up when a senior is dehydrated, pick up when their gait is off, when their balance is off, and use some machine learning—some deep learning—to compare that to the baseline,” says Wilmink, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt University. “Then, when they’re at risk for falling, it whispers in their ear, and can predict when a senior is at risk for falling, three months, six months, one year out.”
Those capabilities might seem too prescient to be true, but Wilmink says that the company has data that show it can predict risk of a fall with 70 percent accuracy within a month time frame. To develop the right algorithms, the company used mined data of people who fell based on motion at a person’s waist, monitoring changes in gait and balance, he says.
WiseWear uses a different design for its hearing aid than for the jewelry, and keeps the two operations separate, Wilmink says. The hearing aid and its potential are still in experimental stages, and Wilmink says the company will have to seek approval as a medical device to sell it. That’s why the company is using the grant funding to pay for the hearing aid and money from investors to fund the jewelry development, he says.
Though it may seem to be more surface level than the hearing aid, the jewelry has some innovative technology itself. The novelty in WiseWear’s jewelry lies in its ability to transmit information wirelessly using metal, says co-founder and vice president of engineering David Elam.
WiseWear developed a design and method of applying it, for which it has patents, which allows an antenna to in essence couple with metal, using that metal to transmit the signal it’s sending, Elam says. Antennas typically have trouble broadcasting through metal casing, which traps the energy emitted by the antenna and doesn’t allow it to be broadcast, he says.
WiseWear’s design resolved that, and was the first to do so fully, Wilmink says. That capability, which Wilmink says is core to the
