As an avid weightlighter, Dr. Eric Hensen knows how annoying earbuds can be at the gym. Hensen, who is also an ear, nose, and throat doctor, watched as the tiny headphones slipped out of sweaty ears and got tangled in machines. For athletes and gym buffs, traditional earbuds just aren’t cutting it. So Hensen decided to reinvent them.

“There’s a guy who I work out with–he does bent-over rows, and he always puts the wire in his mouth while he lifts,” says Dr. Hensen, who is the founder and chief medical officer of wireless earphone maker FreeWavz. “Inevitably, he’ll bite through the wires once a week.”

Hensen says he wanted to design a safer and more comfortable earphone for athletes that would fit snugly and comfortably in the ear and work without tangling wires. He took a look at current listening device design and ultimately came up with a prototype for the FreeWavz headphones, which connect to an audio source via Bluetooth and are designed to stay in the ear even through rigorous exercise.





“I took a set of these really old hearing aids, and I kind of retrofitted them to our idea,” he says. “From there we actually drilled [them] out, made our own housing, put all the components that we wanted in it.”

In an early iteration, the earphones included a built-in MP3 player, but FreeWavz soon heard from potential customers that they’d prefer to listen to music they already stored or streamed of their phones. FreeWavz can pick up audio signals from a phone up to about 33 feet away through Bluetooth networking, he says.

Bluetooth technology’s being integrated into a number of wireless headphone designs lately, from the tiny Earin earbuds to other exercise-focused tools like the Dash earbuds. Dr. Hensen says FreeWavz, in particular, were developed to include all the exercise-centric features the company could pack into its ear-fitting form.

“The MP3 player got dropped because none of our customers wanted it,” he says. “That allowed us to incorporate even more stuff that we wanted.”