A customer developing a new home sleep monitoring system came to us with an inductive belt they were already using. The off-the-shelf belt worked with their existing system, but the same standard version couldn’t be used for the new project. They now needed to develop their own.
The customer knew what the new belt needed to do, but they didn’t have the manufacturing drawing or specification behind the existing belt. They couldn’t give us a drawing, but they could give us the belt that was already working.
The customer wasn’t starting from zero. They were already using an off-the-shelf inductive belt with their existing sleep monitoring system, and that belt was working as intended.
Their new project was different. The belt they were buying was a standard product designed around the existing setup, while the new monitoring system would need its own belt. The customer wanted to move away from relying on that standard version and develop something specifically for the new project.
They also shared some of the physical requirements they were already working with, including a 38 mm lightweight black belt, female buckles at both ends, and a short adapter strap. So this wasn’t a customer asking us, “What kind of belt do I need?” They already had a clear product direction.
What they didn’t have was the manufacturing information behind the inductive belt they were currently using. Because it was an off-the-shelf component, they didn’t have its drawing, internal construction, or manufacturing specification. And with the new project’s volume still relatively small, the existing supply side wasn’t interested in developing a custom version for them.
That left the customer in a very practical position: they knew what they wanted the new belt to do, and they had a working belt in hand — but they didn’t have the information needed to manufacture their own version.
The existing belt was an off-the-shelf product, so the customer had never received a manufacturing drawing for it. They could tell us how it was being used in their current monitoring system and what they needed from the new project, but not how the belt itself had been manufactured.
That left an obvious gap. We had the product requirements, but not the construction information needed to reproduce the belt as a manufacturable component.
Asking for more specifications wouldn’t solve that. The customer hadn’t designed the original belt, so details such as how the inductive component was integrated into the webbing, how it ran through the belt, and how the connection was arranged simply weren’t information they had.
We also couldn’t confirm those details reliably from photos.
So instead of trying to rebuild the missing specification through emails, we suggested a much more practical next step:
Send us the working belt.
Once we had the working belt as a reference, we could work backwards from the physical product and establish the manufacturing information the customer didn’t have.
That would start with the belt itself: its actual dimensions, thickness, stretch behavior, webbing construction, and how the finished parts were assembled. We could then examine the inductive part more closely — how it was incorporated into the belt, where it entered and exited the webbing, and how the connection was arranged.
The purpose wasn’t to make an exact copy of the existing belt. Those details would give us a known construction to compare against the requirements of the new monitoring project.
From there, we could identify what needed to remain in the new construction, what needed to change, and put those manufacturing details into a drawing for the customer to review.
That drawing would give both sides something concrete to develop from. We could handle the webbing construction and manufacturing side, while the customer could confirm whether the new belt met the functional requirements of their monitoring system.
They didn’t need to recreate the original manufacturer’s drawing before coming to us. The working belt gave us enough to start building a manufacturable version for their new project.
Project Privacy: We omit customer-identifying information where needed. The project requirements and development decisions shared here are from the actual project.
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