Our story
I fractured my jaw at 16. I've felt it every day since.
JawZen didn't start in a boardroom. It started with an injury that never fully went away — and a long, frustrating search for relief that actually worked.
JawZen didn't start in a boardroom. It started with an injury that never fully went away — and a long, frustrating search for relief that actually worked.
During a freshman-year PE, another student and I collided head-on at full speed. The impact sent three of my upper front teeth flying out of my mouth and fractured my jaw.
Emergency dental and oral surgery put my teeth back that same day. The teeth healed. The jaw never quite did — and the pain and discomfort from that fracture have been with me ever since.
I didn't want another tool that asked me to do the work.
Living with a chronically tight, aching jaw, I tried everything. Stretches to hold. Tools to press. Handheld massagers to grip against my face for twenty minutes at a time. They all worked — a little — but every one of them asked me to do the work, at the exact moment I had the least energy to do it.
So I started sketching the thing I actually wanted: something I could simply put on. Heat, real massage, and vibration — the three things that genuinely helped — built into one wearable that did the work for me, hands-free, while I lived my life. Here's how it came to life.
No factory line, no investors — just years of sketches, prototypes, and one idea I couldn't let go of.
I drew it the way I'd explain it to a friend: a band that fits any head, a node on each side, and heat plus real massage right where the jaw actually hurts. That first scribble already had the whole idea — put it on, let it work.
The first version was a 9-volt battery, a tangle of wires, and motors clamped to an adjustable band. It looked ridiculous — but strapping it to a friend's head told us in about five minutes that the idea actually worked.
From there it became a loop: 3D-print a housing, wear it, find everything wrong with the fit and the massage, tweak the model, print again. Every round got closer to real relief — and further from "science project."
Dozens of iterations later, the working name no longer fit. What I'd built wasn't about the therapy hardware — it was about the calm on the other side of it. So it became JawZen: hands-free relief, finally finished.
JawZen isn't a one-off gadget. It's the start of a full lineup of relief tools for the millions of people living with TMJD — designed by someone who knows exactly what that daily discomfort feels like, because I still feel it too. Everything we build has to clear one bar: does it actually do the work for you?