Inspiration
Our mission is to provide young business professionals with a sleep improvement product that uses natural methods to provide a better sleep environment, making it easier to fall asleep and improving sleep quality.
Imagine this scenario. It’s 1am in the morning, and you just finished watching some Netflix. The lights are off, you set your alarm, and you’re getting comfy under the blankets. You have an important event tomorrow morning, whether it’s an exam or a big presentation, and you DO NOT WANT to miss it. But, man, that steak I had for dinner was so good. I wonder if I put on any weight? You know who has put on weight? Amy from high school. Oh god I remember in middle school when I embarrassed myself in front of the whole class by calling the teacher mom. I couldn’t show my face for weeks. Annnd it’s 4am. You’re stressing now, telling yourself to stop thinking and go to bed. When you wake up in the morning, you’re dead tired, and not ready for the day at all.
This kind of insomnia problem troubles me and a lot of others. I have tried pills, listening to music and all other different methods and none of them really works. That is the reason we want to create a product that could really solve this problem for people like me.
What it does
Our product will be a sleeping assistant tool. It will be designed as a pillow with the shape of a helmet which covers up the head. There will also be a head massaging set inside the helmet. The SleepHelmet will be designed to track user’s sleeping activity so that it will automatically turn off the music and massage system and wake users up around the time they set when their sleeping is the lightest.
How we built it
For the pillow housing, we have two parts. The gray part in the bottom is the hoodie pillow which can give a surrounding protection for the user's neck, the top blue part is the inner layer of a foam pillow which can wrap the user’s head and give the user full support on his head while sleeping no matter which direction the user is facing. We connect these two parts with Gorilla foam glue because both parts’ texture are soft so we have to use adhesives to provide connection between them. For the head massager, we laser cut a round plate with mounting holes that can provide a base on helping secure the head massager. We then stitch the round plate onto the blue foam pillow insert so the round plate is secured firmly onto the blue foam and the plate folds the head massager up straight so the head massager will fall onto the user's head when they put on. Once we complete the house for the whole, we decide to put the arduino circuit into this pillow case. Since we have a round plate already and it provides a supporting base that we can put extra items onto it. We put the breadboard and arduino on the plastic plate and they fit into the vertical distance between the plate and the top of the pillow case. For the motion sensor and cooling fan, we drill holes on the pillow foam with specific locations and insert them into these holes. In the end we wrap the whole pillowcase with leather covering. We also arrange the power supply cables for Arduino and NodeMCU to be left outside of the pillowcase so it can be powered up with external power bank.
Challenges we ran into
The first is the head massage function we mentioned at the beginning. After trying the Linear Actuator and finding that the effect was not obvious, we conducted several brain storms to discuss better solutions. Through data query and several discussions, we agree that Vibration is more effective. The combined installation of all features is also where we often encounter bottlenecks in the production process. Because the products we want to make are to be worn during sleep, how to best combine comfort and function is a problem that we have been very concerned about from beginning to end. What we are proud of is that we have found a suitable combination through repeated prototyping.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud that we can finally complete the product we originally wanted to achieve. Our final product satisfies all the features we envisioned at the beginning, including massage, motion detection, automation, mobile phone control, ventilation, etc.
What we learned
During the production process, we learned and consolidated a lot of the knowledge we learned this semester. The functions in our products include all the contents that were covered this semester, including PWM, MOSFET, GPIO, ADC, Timer, GPIO, IoT and UI. In making and using the knowledge we have learned, we have gained a deeper understanding of the function and are also more proficient in using them.
What's next for Day Dream Machine OUMA
First of all, although the noise generated by Vibration is already very small, the sound is still there. We can try to add noise-canceling headphones to further improve the noise problem in the future. Secondly, the assembly of the entire product is currently fixed by glue, etc. In the future, we can use 3D printing to make the various parts of the product fit more closely and make the product look more professional and complete.
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