Heather Miller
Elevate your design and manufacturing processes with Autodesk Fusion
The Shiftwave experience is more than just a “sit down and relax” moment. At the touch of a button, pulsed pressure waves calm the body, rebalance the nervous system, and reduce pain.
Shiftwave is delivering an optimized approach to mental and physical restoration for wellness patients, veterans, soldiers, and even NFL football players. Each of the eighteen transducers that are embedded in the Shiftwave chair deliver kinetic energy into the body in the form of pulsed pressure waves which, combined with a blackout mask and guided headphones audio, helps the user “reset and regenerate.”
The system’s complex design merges a chair with sophisticated electronics and patent-pending algorithms. As the company grows and the design evolves, Shiftwave isn’t afraid of change. By embracing new technologies and approaches with Autodesk Fusion, they have improved their workflow and unlocked the ability to iterate faster than ever before.
Redesigning the chair for linebackers
A major adopter of Shiftwave is NFL football teams, especially for relaxation, focus, and post-workout muscle recovery. However, Ryan McCullough, Director of Prototype Development at Shiftwave, notes that the original chair design wasn’t exactly designed for a 400-lb linebacker. So, he and the Shiftwave team needed to find new ways to reinforce the chair to improve its durability for NFL players and beyond.
For the first round of prototyping, McCullough iterated for three weeks and mocked up potential solutions. Ultimately, he found it “over-engineered” and ended up breaking many chairs during the testing phase. Based on this experience, he turned to the Autodesk Fusion Simulation Extension. McCullough was able to solve this design challenge in just one week using generative design. He created three different iterations, each designed specifically for its intended manufacturing method.
“I can do things like an FEA analysis to see where the chair is flexing and then apply that data to the design before even testing it,” McCullough says. “Having taken these chairs to failure, you end up with just a pile of broken metal. With Fusion, you can analyze with much more meaningful data that is more cost-effective—and not destroying chairs along the way.”
Evolving the electronics design
With the original electronics and housing initially designed in another software, Shiftwave will now be able to design boards and housing all in one ecosystem with Fusion and the Signal Integrity Extension. This extension is specifically designed to improve the signal reliability of products with PCBs containing high-speed signal pairs.
“As someone who did not go to school for electrical engineering, the Signal Integrity Extension has given me a tool to fill in the gaps of knowledge,” McCullough says.
“One of the nice aspects of Fusion is its schematic workflow. We can go back and forth, and it saves us so much time with file management in the cloud.”
—Ryan McCullough, Director of Prototype Development, Shiftwave
Unlocking time savings with cloud collaboration
For McCullough and the Shiftwave team, collaboration with Fusion has delivered incredible results for their workflow. Even if others are working in their own “sandbox,” they can ideate both individually and collectively. McCullough can easily take a scrappy idea, share it with the manufacturing engineer, and get valuable input from a different perspective.
“We can both work from the same file and make tracked changes,” he says. “Having a record of changes and milestones is extremely helpful.”
Prior to Fusion, the Shiftwave team grappled with tracking down specific versions of their files or even identifying the latest revision of their design. “Having an archive is helpful because we can go back to previous designs and 3D print any custom parts for a customer that may be different from our current version,” McCullough says.
Since the culture of Shiftwave encourages individual exploration, design history has also been a boon to both their productivity and creativity. “It allows collaboration even in our idea stage, and if someone wants to explore something differently, you can easily keep experimenting,” he says. “If something doesn’t work, you can still go back to take a design in a completely different direction.”
At the end of the day, Fusion has enabled the Shiftwave team to move forward with designs in a faster, more productive way.
“Fusion has improved communication within the design team and when taking things to manufacturing,” McCullough says. “I can take any object, auto-generate a 2D drawing, send it to the shop with a STEP file, and get the part back with all the tolerances defined. It’s invaluable in saving us time all around.”