Inspiration
One day, my friend from the south of Georgia talked about a strange idea called goat wrestling. Its something that younger people did to calm down goats and set them to bed. The way they were able to do so was by listening to the humans heartbeat, and that familiar rhythym calmed them down. Not long after, I questioned whether such a thing could be possible, and whether I can implement such an idea into my life, without the goat part of course. After digging a little bit deeper, me and my partner now are working on figuring out how to integrate this phenomena into sleep.
What it does
Using a pillow that has a built in speaker in it, we simulate the sound of a heart, and you are supposed to allow yourself to follow the descending heart beat until it gets to around 50-60 BPM, the threshold where sleep could begin. We are able to sense the heartrate of the user by having a custom built heart rate sensor.
How we built it
We built it by using two esp32's, and treating one as a transmitter and one as a receiver. The receiver was the speaker within the pillow and the transmitter was the heartbeat sensor. The speaker module consisted of a battery, two speakers, and a lot of wiring. The heartbeat detector used a light sensor and a green light to detect the flow of blood within the veins.
Challenges we ran into
Two components that were vital for this project were unavailable, which were the MAX30102 heart beat sensor and oximeter, and any sort of speaker drivers. We spent a majority of our time trying to build a device that can successfully measure the BPM. The speakers were also hard to work with, since without the drivers, we had some beefy piezo electric buzzers that could get quite loud. We were able to find an integrated circuit that was able to amplify the volume, but could not shake that raspy digital voice that is such a contrast from a real heart beat.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Some of the accomplishments that we're proud of is actually having something built by the end of this thing that can serve a purpose for others.
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