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Description:
For our Ubiquitous computing course in Chalmers me and some other students in a group worked on a project, named happillow, where we embed an alarm clock insider a pillow. This pillow can detect the snoring of the person sleeping on it and would vibrate to alarm the person to move it’s head. The picture above shows the finished prototype with me sleeping on it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPzD1vM7McM]
In the below picture the process of tuning a normal looking pillow to embed the above mentioned features is shown. We used an Arduino board as the main controller, a 3-dimensional accelerometer, a vibrating motor, a small speaker, 6 AA batteries, and some more.
Concept:
In order to spend a quality life, we as humans need to have a sound sleep and get up in time so as to play our part in the world. For the first aspect i.e. sound sleep, we make use of an object which can add to comfort and relaxation during our sleep. Not only for the sake of comfort, but also at times to serve as a remedy to some muscular and sleeping posture problems which cause snoring. However, we want to get up on time in the morning and alarms do serve for this purpose. Normal clocks lack the interactivity with humans and are placed on our bed sides.
This commonness in locality of pillow and alarm clocks triggered the idea of embodying the alarm functionality within the pillow and making this pillow relaxing and comforting so as to help us in having a balanced quality sleep. The use of pillow for addressing medical problems such as snoring got the attention of the group, since there has been usage of pillows for curing snoring. However, these pillows differ from the normal pillow in shape and dimension making it obvious to the others.
Hardware and Software :
The information about these are not planned to be published in public, sorry.
Pictures:
For the official website take a look here :
http://web.student.chalmers.se/groups/uc08-9/
This project has been done with:
Farshid Jafari Harandi
Erik Johansson
Azadeh Ghafari Nia
Asif Slahuddin
Hi this is an amazing project, I have been thinking of making something like this for myself for a few months now and I just started seriously looking into it when I came across your project. I went to the official site for it and noticed that there was source code in the download section but the pdf cannot be found. Is there anyway I could get my hands on this. I would like the extra help to see how you did it and hopefully that will show me how to create my pillow which isn’t nearly as complex and awesome as yours but it’s something that I would love to make for myself as a first project. Thanks in advance for any help
Dear Duran,
Thanks for your comment. Making the display was one of the milestones in the project. It was a tricky part which I would suggest you do with care and patience.
Since the software is a contribution of member groups I cannot publish it on my website. But, we have used Arduino board to develop this project and most of the source code where taken from ready-made codes for Arduino. With the Arduino it would not be as cumbersome as it may get with regular development boards.
Then about the display as you can see they are simple LEDs wired up with a resistor in serial. Each segment is driven through a Serial-to-Parallel shift register. This chip increases the number of outputs to handle more than 28 segments.
The vibrating motor is driven with a simple NPN darlington transistor.
LEDs cathode poles are connected to each other and using a PNP the power to them is controlled with PWM resulting the dim function.
Good luck
Thanks for the help I will definitely try out the Arduino for my pillow
Have you heard about snoreguard do you should happen to know if that product can help with snoring?
Hi Britt,
No I haven’t. Do you have a link to that or any videos of it ?
Improper sleeping position and being overweright are just one of the many causes of snoring. Take the time to identify the underlying cause in order for you to find the best treatment for it.
Happillow has a page on facebook now, like it:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Happillow/146824088706263?sk=app_4949752878