Neurable, a Boston-based startup, teamed with Fresco to design and develop their first product for the consumer market – the Enten headphones. These BCI headphones monitor your brain activity and provide useful information for your daily life, like patterns of when you are focused or distracted.
When you think of BCI, do you picture intricate monitoring devices, headcaps, and wires? Neurable’s vision aimed to overcome those associations. We designed the BCI headphones to look, appear, and behave like a premium product, tackling numerous design and engineering challenges to seamlessly integrate the technology into a desirable form factor.
For this novel technology, we began by understanding its application and the anticipated user environments. From user personas, we tailored our design choices in size, shape, material, color, and visual segmentation, considering a dense market of visual trends.
We embarked on an R&D journey to research, design, spec, source, and manufacture selectively conductive 3D knitted fabrics. By experimenting with weave patterns and emphasizing ear comfort, we optimized the design for EEG channel skin contact and internal board connection. The final knit product conformed to 3D ear cushions, ensuring aesthetics, comfort, acoustics, and sensor performance.
Through several engineering prototype iterations, we fine-tuned the integration of BCI technology into the Enten headphones, ensuring manufacturability. Fresco produced both individual and small-batch prototypes for design validation, internal review, and user testing.
During the design phase, we built high-craft appearance models for early product photography, marketing campaigns, stakeholder alignment, investor pitches, and to refine color and material selections.
Fresco provided Neurable with a fully executed and documented industrial design and mechanical engineering blueprint for scaled manufacturing. We assisted Neurable in collaborating with contract manufacturers, v
