About WearNex
A wearable technology commercialisation partner, Not a consultancy
WearNex is a wearable technology commercialisation partner, founder-led and built around a simple observation: the same problems keep repeating. We stay on the journey with our clients, from early concept, through commercialisation, to a product that actually ships.
After fifteen years working in wearable product development, one problem kept coming up again and again. Projects that work fine as a prototype often fall apart on the way to becoming an actual product. Not because of a single discipline, but because rarely does anyone own the product end to end, the point where garment manufacturing, electronics, software and IP all have to work together seamlessly. Different industries, different processes, different ways of talking about the same problem. That’s usually where things go wrong. Most consultancies are strong in one area, such as software, but rarely do they have the know how to cover the breadth of wearable development. WearNex exists specifically to cover that gap, so a project doesn’t stall waiting for someone else to bridge the disciplines.
Michael John Lynch, founder
Michael John is a Chartered Engineer with over fifteen years in wearable technology, specialising in the design, development and testing of hardware and software systems that have to survive contact with the real world.
He is named inventor on over 120 patents relating to wearable technology, across the UK, US, Europe and China, and has taken products to market across medical, industrial and consumer sectors. Before founding WearNex, he was VP of Innovation at a smart clothing business. He holds a BEng (Hons) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, is a Chartered Engineer with the IET, a Chartered Fellow of the Textile Institute, and a vetted expert witness on the UK Register of Expert Witnesses. He sits on the steering board of the E-Textiles Network and reviews new e-textile standards for IPC.
He also co-authors peer-reviewed research into why e-textiles struggle to scale, presenting regularly at the international E-Textiles Conference, work that documents, with evidence from more than thirty industry professionals, the same coordination and IP problems WearNex was founded to solve. Read more about that research →
A specialist hand picked network, not a static team
E-textiles is too broad a field for any single person, or any small fixed team, to cover credibly. One project may call for specialist garment construction expertise, the next for bespoke antenna design. WearNex is built to handle both.
We work as a founder-led practice with a hand-picked network of specialists, brought in for exactly the work a project needs. That network spans electronic design, schematic and PCB work, garment design and development, mechanical design, test engineering, bespoke test equipment, research, healthcare professionals for study design and the conduct of user trials, application software for desktop and mobile, data science for on textile ML and AI, and IP specialists for invention capture. Between them, our core team brings over 75 years of combined experience in wearable product development.
Many of these working relationships go back over ten years. That kind of history means no time wasted aligning on what “good” looks like, just a team that already knows how to build something splendid and fit for purpose.
The Lab
WearNex operates a bespoke Lab, built specifically for this kind of work, wearable and e-textile development, testing, and independent verification. Because it’s ours, projects stay entirely in-house and entirely confidential, which matters when a client’s core value is the IP they haven’t protected yet.
In-house capability covers flex circuit design and assembly, and wireless systems including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, RF, cellular and other IoT technologies. Sensing work spans a full range of modalities, IMUs, accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes, biosignals such as ECG, along with temperature and humidity, gas and noise sensing, in addition to optical sensing. On the output side, the Lab supports heat, light and haptic actuation. It also covers AR and VR work, including smart glasses, human-computer interaction, on-device machine learning, and wash testing, the last of which is where a surprising number of promising e-textile projects fail. The Lab also develops bespoke test equipment, built to let garment factories test e-textile products quickly and reliably on their own production lines, rather than sending samples out and waiting.
This same Lab is what makes our expert witness and due diligence work genuinely independent. Validation and infringement disputes rarely hold up on desk research alone, having the equipment to physically test a claim, rather than take it on paper, elevates us from an opinion to an assessment. The same applies to due diligence, a technology can be verified directly, rather than accepted on a vendor’s word.
Work with us
Whether it’s commercialising early-stage research, scaling an existing product, or building your first prototype, we’ll give you an honest technical read on whether it holds up, scales, and can be protected.