Date Start
December 2022
Date End
Current Employer
Wearable Blood Flow Monitor
Lumia measures a Flow Index from the ear using photoplethysmography (PPG) to help people with POTS, ME/CFS, and other forms of dysautonomia to manage their orthostatic symptoms. As the mechanical engineer for Lumia and 5th employee, I brought the company from a few working prototypes in 2022 all the way through scaled production and assembly for a commercial launch in 2024. When I joined there were only a handful of employees (~6) and even fewer full-time engineers, so I had to use and develop many skills across disciplines to do what needed to be done.
Lumia 1.0: Learning to Launch a Product
R&D Efforts
I focused on hardware efforts like making custom optical lenses, assembling prototypes for study support, and rapidly iterating to optimize device signal quality, comfort, and stability in the ear. I designed a silicone jacket which adapts the device to many ear shapes. I also developed the photovoltaic charging method through our Light Station design and flex circuit connection. Many of the design challenges were tightly SWaP-C constrained and solved while performing lab management duties.
On the firmware side, I used Python to run parameter sweeps of important settings and improved the internal signal-to-noise metric after discovering improper scaling with LED brightness. My background in physics was often useful for breaking down problems and modeling the situation accurately enough to debug critical issues.
Manufacturing
To shepherd my designs through manufacturing and release, I worked on ICT fixtures for PCB testing, gluing robot setup and UV-curing fixtures, laser-deposited-structure (LDS) antenna design and vendor management, photovoltaic and battery testing, waterproofing, SOP development, cosmetic paint layer development, electrical schematic and layout, and other related tasks.
Beyond
Often I was able to bring value to Lumia through my creative skills beyond the product design for which I was directly responsible. For example I generated laser-cut signage, diagrams for user communications, and made camera-ready prototypes of the device for our crowdfunding commercial.
Lumia 2.0: Systems Engineering and Leadership
Leading the mechanical team was very rewarding, offering lots of opportunities to learn about product design from the perspective of project management, vendor communications, and systems engineering. For Lumia 2.0, I participated in early architecture discussions which allowed me to steer the product towards scalable user-centered design.
On the team development side, I created a product design life-cycle based on the team's style combined with learnings from an MIT OpenCourseware lecture series on Systems Engineering. One-on-one discussions with team members really helped me identify product requirements, solidify design reviews, and make sure that critical interfaces were being covered.
This project is ongoing as of [07-04-2026], and I'm excited to see us get to scaled production soon!
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