Sleep Inducing Light

Inspiration

Singapore’s students and working adults face severe sleep deprivation due to stress, late-night screen use, and irregular schedules. Insufficient sleep contributes to poor health, lower productivity, and higher healthcare costs. Current solutions like apps or fixed sleep lamps don’t adapt to real behavior, making them ineffective.

Target Audience

Students and working adults in Singapore who intend to sleep on time but often overrun their plan because late-night screen use stretches longer than expected.

Solution

Sleep Inducing Light turns your chosen screen-time budget into a gentle sunset. You set a duration in the app (e.g., 20 minutes). The lamp starts soft purple and, over your timer, slowly removes blue and lowers brightness until the room is warm amber/red. In the last minutes it gives a friendly cue by gently brightening and dimming once a second, then settles at very dim amber that makes the room feel ready for sleep. The red/amber end state also makes doomscrolling harder: the red light masks much of the phone’s blue, lowers contrast, and feels less “rewarding,” so videos are less stimulating. To turn the light off you must leave the feed and open the app, which breaks the scrolling loop. You can still add five minutes or turn it off any time, no lockouts so the nudge stays respectful while effective. The current prototype focuses on the light-as-timer; a simple pillow sensor to auto-start when you lie down is planned.

How we built it

We placed a small Wi-Fi Arduino (UNO R4 WiFi) inside an inexpensive RGB lamp and taught it to blend colours smoothly so the change looks like a real sunset rather than steps. The lamp shows a tiny web page that any phone can open to start, stop, or set a duration. If home or campus Wi-Fi is unreliable, the lamp creates its own mini hotspot so it still works. A lightweight mobile app (React Native) sends the same commands so starting your “sunset” takes two taps. Everything runs on safe USB power using off-the-shelf parts.

Challenges we ran into

Making the fade feel truly calm took careful tuning; basic brightness steps looked jumpy until we adjusted the curve and colour mix. Campus Wi-Fi was inconsistent, so we added the fallback hotspot to keep the demo reliable anywhere. We also met hardware quirks like a non-working pin and LED polarity differences, which we solved with pin remapping and a simple “invert” option in software.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a working, offline-capable prototype that any phone can control in seconds. The “dusk” engine blends spectrum and brightness smoothly, ends with a kind final cue, and leaves the room in a sleepy amber-red. The whole build stays low cost and easy to replicate as a DIY kit or student project.

What we learned

Room light beats phone pop-ups at bedtime because it sits outside the attention trap. Slow, smooth colour change is essential; sudden jumps wake people up. Finishing in amber-red not only supports sleep but also makes doomscrolling less appealing by cancelling much of the phone’s blue and lowering contrast. A tiny extra step—opening the app to switch the lamp off—works as a simple pattern break that helps people stop. Reliability matters more than features, so designing for flaky networks first made the prototype feel solid in real rooms.

What's next for Sleep Inducing Light

We will expand from a single lamp to whole-room control by linking with Wi-Fi bulbs, strips, or ceiling lights, with simple presets like Study, Relax, and Sleep so the entire space moves from purple to amber together. In addition to stopping late-night scrolling, we will track basic sleep patterns such as when timers start and end, how often extra minutes are added, and how regular bedtimes become, with a clear weekly view and local storage. Personal settings for start and end colour, maximum brightness, and fade speed will make it fit different users and rooms, and we will package a nicer enclosure and plug-and-play kit for dorms and bedrooms.