ATHENA
A haptic collar designed to make live music accessible for Deaf listeners.
ROLE
Founder and Inventor
OVERVIEW
£10,000 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow 2025 prize winner.
Featured on SVT, Swedish national television.
Validated through research with the Deaf community and partnerships with Deaf Rave.
Technical Advisory from RNID and Imperial College professors.
PROBLEM
Music is meant to be felt. But for many Deaf people at live events, that experience has become increasingly inaccessible. As venues scaled up, the physical sensation of nearby speakers was lost. Current solutions like haptic vests are bulky, bass focused, and prioritise function over style.
Solution
Athena is a jewellery-inspired haptic collar that translates music into vibrational and bone conduction feedback, giving Deaf listeners an intimate, full-body music experience on their own terms.
By leveraging the mechanoreceptors in the skin and the natural resonance of the collarbone, Athena projects music throughout the body. It mimics the intimate, full-body immersion of speaker-listening while simultaneously stimulating the auditory cortex.
The project began as an immersive seating concept designed to envelop users in sound during meditation. Through mentorship from a Drake Music executive, collaboration with a Hi-Fi specialist, and research with the Deaf community, the idea evolved into a discreet wearable with granular control over intensity, pulses, and patterns across the body.
Feel the beat
A low-fi prototype using bone conduction speakers proved the body-projection theory and secured Athena a winning place at the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow competition.
Next Steps: Currently collaborating with Deaf Rave on user testing and a Professor of Music and Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College to develop the high-fidelity prototype.
Published Features Include