Three products with Singapore roots made TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026, published on 15 October: OSIM’s uDream.AI massage chair, Strutt’s ev¹ smart wheelchair and the Fender Audio Mix headphones, which Singapore company Riffsound designed for the guitar maker. The list has 300 entries, is not ranked, and carries another 100 Special Mentions.
The three sit in very different corners of the list: home wellness, mobility and audio.
OSIM uDream.AI
The uDream.AI is OSIM International’s flagship massage chair, and the TIME entry goes beyond the rollers. The chair uses a smartphone camera and AI to read small changes in facial blood flow, turns that into a Stress Score, then builds a session that mixes massage techniques from Thai, Japanese and Chinese masters with light panels, soundscapes and scent. OSIM also made a tea range to cover the fifth sense.
The AI layer comes from Binah.ai, OSIM’s partner on the uDream.AI. The massage hardware includes V-Hand Pro+ and 4-Hand Pro+ massage, auto shoulder detection, hand, arm, hip and thigh airbags, and warm air for the back and legs. The chair has also won a Red Dot Design Award and a Singapore Good Design Award this year.
The shell shape is deliberate. OSIM’s marketing team told TIME the form was inspired by the chambered nautilus, the spiral-shelled sea creature.
In Singapore, OSIM sells the uDream.AI through its own online store, where the chair now carries the TIME Best Inventions 2026 title.
Strutt ev¹
Strutt is based at Bulim Square in the west of Singapore, and TIME filed its ev¹ under the line “a smarter power wheelchair”. It looks like a power chair and drives more like an autonomous car: 360-degree sensing for collision avoidance, voice-controlled navigation, a joystick for manual control, and four motors with active front-wheel steering.
Strutt sells two versions: the ev¹ is the full smart package, and the ev¹c is the performance-focused model with the same Quad-Drive system. Both are rated for up to 32km of range, a 160kg weight limit, IPX5 water resistance and a 780mm turning radius. The chair splits into five modules for transport, and the battery comes in 640Wh or a 288Wh flight-approved pack.
In Singapore, the ev¹c is sold through Mobot, Strutt’s first exclusive distributor. Mobot sells it at S$8,999 before GST, against a regular price of S$9,799, with test drives at its headquarters. Mobot sells it with the top speed capped at 6km/h to meet local rules; Strutt’s global spec quotes 12.9kph.
Fender Audio Mix
The Mix carries the Fender name, but Singapore-based Riffsound designed it. TIME picked it for repairability: the battery, ear cushions and headband all swap out without tools. Riffsound chief executive Chern Wei Mah compared it to a guitar, where you change the broken part rather than the instrument.
Fender quotes 40mm graphene drivers, hybrid noise cancelling and up to 100 hours of playback with noise cancelling off, or 52 hours with it on. The 100-hour figure is Fender’s, measured at 50 per cent volume. A 15-minute charge gives eight hours with noise cancelling, and a full charge takes two hours.
The headphones weigh 330g and use Bluetooth 5.3 with SBC, AAC, LC3 and LHDC. The box includes the FWD Tx USB-C transmitter, which adds a 96kHz/24-bit lossless mode, a low-latency mode under 20 milliseconds and Auracast broadcasting to several headphones at once. A 3.5mm input keeps the Mix playing when the battery is flat, without the noise cancelling or the digital processing.
