PRE2015 3 Groep4
This is the wiki page of Group IV of USE Project: Robots Everywhere.
Our idea is a smart bedroom that helps you to fall asleep, stay asleep and wake up. This is done by simulating sunset and sunrise respectively.
To simulate the sunrise and sunset as best as possible, a software has control of the light intensity, temperature and sound level in the room. This "robot" also keeps track of how deep the person is sleeping: this is done because waking up while in a light sleep is much more comfortable than waking up while in a deep- or REM sleep.
Group Members
- 0888465 - Thomas Bardoel
- 0942166 - Wesley van den Broek
- 0887435 - Jeroen Ermers
- 0888864 - Luuk Ladegaard
- 0887879 - Roel Montree
- 0835870 - Jeroen Verbakel
Smart Bedroom
Our idea is the smart bedroom. This is a bedroom which will be controlled by a so-called smart alarm. The smart alarm will analyze the person in the room when he is awake and when he sleeps. The smart alarm can also control the lights and blinds in the bedroom. The purpose of a smart alarm is to let the person sleep as well as possible. This alarm can be very useful for people with insomnia.
A few ways to let the person sleep as well as possible are helping the person to get asleep, waking the person after a full sleep cycle and waking the person with special light which will be experienced as a sunrise. The smart alarm has an integrated tool which can measure the heartbeat, what gives information about the sleeping process. The person could also give feedback. For example, he can rate his experience after every night, or he can only report the alarm if he experienced something unpleasantly. The smart alarm will use this feedback the next nights to improve the sleep experience of the person.
The smart bedroom will be integrated on your smartphone. You can set the wake up time, or wake up interval, easily on your smartphone. It communicates with the server of the smart bedroom. This server controls the blinds, lights, sound and temperature in your room. When the person is waking up, he can give his rating at his smartphone. But he can also see his sleep pattern on his smartphone of all nights.
A method which is very precise is measuring the heartbeat with the aid of infrared radiation. But this method is still in his development and will be very expensive. So we'll use an other method, namely sound recognition. This method measures the breath and translate this to a heartbeat. But a footnote is, that this method has to be calibrated over some nights to get a good estimate. And sleeping together can also be a problem with this method. But this method is much cheaper and can be used nowadays. Maybe in the future we could use infrared.
Scenario
Here's a short story to illustrate our idea:
John is a student at the university of technology Eindhoven. He has sleeping problems so he decided to invest in a smart bedroom. When John goes to sleep, he sets the wake up time to anywhere between 7am and 7:30am. Now it is time to sleep. The bracelet that John is wearing is measuring the heartbeat and sends the data to his smartphone. Also, the smartphone check his movements to see in what phase of the sleeping cycle he is. Around 7am, the smart bedroom notices that John almost completed a sleep cycle. Since John will have completed this sleep cycle during the wake up interval, his smartphone will send instructions to the server of the smart bedroom. The smart bedroom will allow the windows to let more sunlight pass through and will also raise the temperature. When getting closer to finishing the sleep cycle, more and more sunlight will go through the window and the temperature will keep going up. This will allow a much more natural wake up than usual. The sleep cycle has ended but the smart bedroom notices that John is still asleep even though all sunlight goes through the window and the temperature is raised to the maximum allowable level, so it decides to play a relaxing sound which builds up in volume to force a wake up. Finally John wakes up at 7:20 am and he is not as sleepy us usual. He is able to get out of bed without any problem and is ready for his day at the university. John also rates his sleeping experience and the alarm will use this information for the next night.
Use aspects
The smart bedroom is a dream for many people. Here, the USE-aspects of the smart bedroom will be discussed discussed.
The user will benefit from the smart bedroom because this integrates his blinds and lighting into his smartphone. This is the first step towards home automation. By crossing the barrier of combining your living space with your mobile devices, it becomes very easy to expand on this.
The smart bedroom helps to battle tiredness, and therefor stress, which can also be considered a benefit for the society. Besides tackling tiredness in general, the smart bedroom is great for people with insomnia.
Due to the integrated lighting and blinds in the bedroom, it becomes possible to sleep during the day. This possibly opens up all kinds of new lifestyles, such as working in multiple shifts during 24 hours, decreasing the morning and evening commute, by spreading the starting hours throughout the day.
A good night's rest greatly improves productivity, which is good for both society and enterprise. Through the smart bedroom, we can open a whole new market in home automation, enabling many new jobs, startup companies and other benefits to enterprise. If you once again consider working night shifts, you'll see this is beneficial to enterprise as well, in decreasing the size of offices, for not everyone will work there at once.
Users
Primary users:
- The person who sleeps in the smart bedroom
Secondary users:
- Other users sleeping in the smart bedroom
- People living with the primary user
Tertiary users:
- Scientists (data collection on sleep)
- Employers (more productive personnel)
- Engineers (that install and service the smart bedroom)
- Medical personnel (for people that need monitoring when sleeping)
User needs
Primary users
The person who sleeps in the smart bedroom
- The user should be able to set the time. The option to synchronize the time with the time according to your smartphone would be very helpful.
- The user should be able to see what time it is in the dark. The user could simply open his/her phone, or there could be an option to continuously display the time. This would, however, drain its power fairly quickly, so it's not recommended.
- The user should be able to see what time it is in the dark. The user could simply open his/her phone, or there could be an option to continuously display the time. This would, however, drain its power fairly quickly, so it’s not recommended.
- The alarm clock should have a snooze option. Being able to adjust the duration before the alarm goes off again could be useful. Also, there should be a possibility to setup multiple alarms.
- The alarm should have a volume control. This could simply be the phone’s volume control.
- The user should have the possibility to choose between three options: no alarm, a standard alarm which wakes you up at a specific time and the smart alarm.
- In case of the standard alarm, the user should be able to choose when he/she wants to be woken up and what sound the alarm should make: a repeating pervasive tone, the radio or perhaps a song which is stored in the phone.
- In case of the smart alarm, the user should be able to indicate in which time frame he/she wants to wake up. If the system can’t find a suitable moment to wake up the user, the standard alarm should go off at the end of this time frame.
- Perhaps the user should be able to indicate when it’s a suitable moment to be woken up. However the user probably doesn’t know a lot about sleep patterns and such, so it’s not a necessary option.
- The user should be able to choose what the standard and smart alarm control, like the lights, the blinds and the temperature of the room. These could also have different settings depending on the user’s preferences.
- The system should be able to deliver understandable information to the user about how he/she slept that night, the nights before and in average. The user should be able to decide whether or not he/she wants the information to be (anonymously) shared on the internet for statistical purposes and/or be available for his/her doctor.
- The system shouldn’t badly influence the user’s sleep in any way.
- The system should be adaptable to a changing bedroom layout, which it probably is because most is done by the user’s smartphone, which is of course portable.
Secondary users
Other users sleeping in the smart bedroom
- Because the smart alarm wakes up its user based on the sounds he/she makes during sleeping, it perhaps won’t work when there are more people sleeping in the same room. In addition to that, in most cases there’s no moment where it’s for everyone ideal to wake up, so using the smart alarm would be useless. The users could still use the standard alarm, of course.
People living with the primary user
- These people don’t want to be involuntarily woken up by the alarm, but it’s more up to the primary user to decide if something will be done about this. He/she could for example decide to use (wireless) earphones or make adjustments to the room and especially the door to make it more sound proof.
Tertiary users
Scientists who collect the data on how people sleep
- The scientists should have a direct link to the database of shared information about people’s sleep.
- The information needs to be complete (so as much information as possible), structured and easily exportable to other statistical programs.
Employers of the users of the smart bedroom
- The employers benefit more from active and well-rested employees.
Engineers that install and service the smart bedroom
- The system should use mainstream components like normal screws, standard European cable inlets and outlets etc.
- When installing the system, the components should arrive in an orderly fashion, so similar parts are grouped together in a plastic bag for example, and a detailed instruction manual should be included. If necessary, the system should be delivered with a few tools which are specifically designed for installing it.
- The system should come with a detailed troubleshooting manual which suggest what could be wrong and how it could be fixed if there’s a problem with it.
- If necessary, the company behind the production of these smart bedrooms should hire and train personnel who are specifically employed to deal with this system.
Medical personnel for people who need monitoring when sleeping
- The medical personnel should have a direct link to the information of their patients.
- The information needs to be complete, structured and easily exportable to other statistical programs.
- In case the medical personnel has no experience with handling data, the information needs to be presented in a way which is easy to understand, with graphs for example. The presentation should still be able to show important aspects which are vital for the personnel’s diagnose of the patient’s sleep patterns.