PRE2024 3 Group21

,Group Members

Member	Student Number	Program
Stefan Baltac	1808877	Electrical Engineering
Octavian Astefanei	1836374	Electrical Engineering
Kerim Gjergjizi	1813420	Electrical Engineering

Problem statement, goals & motivation

Traditional alarm clocks work, as everyone, knows by making a sound at a certain time during the day and having them be turned off by some kind of button (or screen movement in the case of smartphones). However, in certain times, if for example the time at which one needs to wake up is not optimal, the probability of the alarm clock being successful drops. Due to sleep inertia one can either completely miss the alarm, subconsciously turn it off (due to muscle memory) etc. This kind of fear can also be spotted in behaviors such as the ones related to setting multiple sequential alarms, which is quite common especially in student populations [1].

The main goal is to design and prototype an alarm clock such that the risk of the aforementioned scenario is minimised by improving upon the preexisting knowledge base on this topic.

TODO: expand the problem statement description, may overwrite the initial discussion section

Planning

Task	Responsible	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6	Week 7
Research	Stefan, Octavian, Kerim	X	X	X
Interviews	Stefan, Octavian, Kerim		X	X
Concept	Octavian, Kerim				X
Development	Stefan					X
Prototyping	Stefan, Octavian						X	X

Approach

• Research if first gathered about common interactions with the alarm clock that are currently in use (smartphones) and how users interact with various features (such as snoozing), common causes of sleep inertia, and what activities require a higher state of wakefulness which could be further leveraged.
• Interviews are conducted with the target group on points from the research or created hypothesis which should be expanded upon. The interviews shall be performed anonymously where an interviewer asks a set of predefined question and the transcript/recording of the conversation is stored/disposed of later in an appropriate way.
• A concept design of the prototype is created where the list of requirements and features is define.
• The development phase follows where a technical definition of an the example prototype is created.
• Lastly the prototype is assembled and tested to measure the validity of the conclusions.

State of the Art

CLOCKY - A robot alarm clock that makes you go after it to turn off.

TERMINIGHTOR - An app that makes the user scan an NFC chip (such as any access card) in order to turn of the alarm

QRALARM - An app that makes the user scan a QR code in order to turn off the alarm.

I CAN'T WAKE UP! - An app that makes the user solve some puzzles in order to turn off the alarm.

PHILIPS WAKE UP LIGHT- A combination of alarm clock and light that aims to create a more graceful way of waking the user up.

The first have movement as the action that has been extrapolated in order to make turning off the alarm more difficult. Considering that movement is a rather basic function of the human body and it doesn't necessitate being awake it could be argued that there could be a chance of those certain tasks being done subconsciously. The robot however does have the benefit of needing the user to go after it, but depending on how far the robot goes or if the pattern is predictable. And if it can go far that may also not be a good option if there are multiple people living in the house.

The last chooses capacity in random activities as the threshold for determining if the user is awake, while some of them aren't far from the previous criticism, such as the one requiring the user to shake the device, some rely more on the metal capacity of the user in the moment. While a good idea it is perhaps not such a good option to have the use solve 6 math equations to turn off the alarm, as it may end up being rather inconvenient. It is the same logic as the best way to wake up a person being to have a raid siren make noise for 10 minutes, but that would not be exactly a desirable solution.

TODO: expand with images and more detailed description of each product

Initial Discussion

TODO: transcribe the initial assumption and intuitive results regarding the device

Research

TODO: description of general remarks to the most important research results

Failure of multi-modal alarm clocks

TODO: Add detailed research description

Anxiety in regards to missing alarms

TODO: Add detailed research description

Variation in grip strength in relation to wakefulness

TODO: Add detailed research description

Interview Questions

Questions about waking up:

1. Do you have trouble waking up in the morning?
2. Have you ever experienced turning off your alarm clock in the morning and going back to sleep?
3. If yes, have you ever closed an alarm in the morning and going back to sleep without remembering it?
4. Have you ever missed classes / were late for university / work because of this?
5. Have you tried using special apps that make you solve an exercise or take some steps for the alarm to turn off?
6. If yes how well did they work for you?
7. Do you have a good sleep schedule ?

Questions about the product:

1. Would you be interested in buying a smart alarm clock that would help you wake up in the morning?
2. How much would you be willing to pay for it?
3. If the device is not connected to the internet with what types of sensors would you be comfortable? (e.g. camera, distance sensors, microphone etc.)
4. Would you want it to track your sleeping quality and wake up times?
5. Would you be comfortable with the device adapting its behaviour based on how you interact with it?

User study

Personas

Product Requirements

Id	Requirement Description
R-01	The alarm clock shall be able to be programmed at what time it should wake up the user.
R-02	The alarm clock time shall be able to be programmed by the user.
R-03	The alarm clock shall be able to emit a sound loud enough to wake up the user.
R-04	The alarm clock shall be able to be stopped by the means of the user exerting any kind of force agains an electromechanical device.
R-05	The point at which the user's attempt to stop the alarm should be determined by the current draw to the electromechanical device.
R-06	The user shall be able to set the maximum force the electromechanical device is allowed to exert.
R-07	The alarm clock should be able to impose multiple cycles of the user overpowering the mechanical device.
R-08	The alarm clock shall have a way of determining if the user has gone back to bed.
R-09	The alarm clock shall keep track of user behaviour over time in order to maximise its ability to wake up the user and the experience of the user itself.
R-10	The alarm clock shall be powered by the means of a main's connection.
R-11	The overall alarm clock should not cost morethat 35 Euros.
R-12	The user shall be able to provide feedback to the alarm clock in case of failure to wake up.
R-13	The alarm clock shall have a time threshold after deactivation after which it will no longer check if the user is bed or not.
R-14	The alarm clock threshold for stopping to actively check for the user's presence in bed should be able to be changed based on data accumulated by the system.

Design

General Description

The important additions to a classical alarm clock that this design offers are represented in the way that the devices is able to actively check whether the user is in bed and its ability to adapt based on the user's behavior and the manner in which the alarm itself is turned off. Starting from the ground up, the first step was to move away from the simple motions used to turn off classical alarms, let them be in the form of a phone app or a more classical bedside digital/analog one. This was done in the form of having the user utilise a threshold amount of force in order to turn the alarm off. The intended result is to, once, reduce user anxiety in regards to the possibility of not waking up [1], and second, in order to raise the probability of the user having to be in a more awoken state in order to successfully turn the alarm off [3]. The next step was the introduction of a way in which the alarm clock can tell if the user has gone back to bed and act accordingly, based on previous data and negative user feedback.

Actuators

Speaker

The main role of the speaker is standard in the sense of an alarm clock, as it is used in order to generate a sound meant to wake the user up. The generated sound was chosen to be a 520Hz square wave signal due to the fact that: it is a simple sound which can be more accurately tested in an isolated environment and thus obtain a better appreciation for its efficiency in waking the user up and that from a multiple set of such sounds it is the one that offers the best performance in this context [5].

Micro-metal DC Motor

The motor is used, paired with a way to measure absolute positions (in this case a potentiometer), to provide the counteractive force in the "turning off" procedure of the alarm. An alternative would have been to use some kind of mechanical system to gauge user force, however with the need of commensurability of the amount of force threshold and the ability to emulate various kinds of haptic feedback through the feedback loop, the choice of using an electromechanical device in a closed loop system was chosen. A micro-metal DC motor with a 100:1 gear ratio was as a result of its compact form and output torque. The motor is connected to a potentiometer through a set of gears with a 1:1 gear ration. The force applied by the DC motor is controlled through a PWM signal generated by the internal computer/mictrocontroller. The nice simplicity of the setup is that the system in which the duty cycle of the input voltage is the input the output torque of the motor is the output represents a linear system. This can be deduced by first having the motor only apply static force (as that is how it is going to be used), thus the voltage drop over the motor winding will be 0. TODO: Discuss control strategy.

LCD Display

The LCD display is used in order to display the current time and display additional information in regards to what operation the user is performing a a certain moment, in relation to the device (setting a new alarm, feedback that the alarm has been deactivated etc.).

Sensors

The design features two main sensing inputs. The first one is a standard digital camera which will be pointed from above at the user's bed in order to check if the user is sleeping. This detection is done by first acquiring an image from the digital camera and using Tensorflow's BodyPix computer vision model to detect the visible sections of the user's body. The model does not require full vision of the entire human body and is able to detect sections of it. Note that this does however limit the probability of success of the measurement as it requires a minimal area of the user's body to be visible (e.g. such as the head), which may cause false negatives in the cases where the user is completely covered by the blanket. On the other hand the system should be quite resilient to false positives which have the capacity to worsen the user experience much more than compared with the false negatives. Furthermore, some geometrical analysis will be performed on the resulted detected areas. In such an analysis the content within the area is not taken into account but rather the size and shape of it.

As displayed in the diagram above. The results of the detection are then used in relation to previous measurements, the amount of time the user stays in bed after the alarm has ringed and determines if the alarm should be turned on again to have the user leave the bed.

The second sensor in the system is a current sensor in order to measure the current supplied to the DC motor which exerts the opposing force. Then the voltage difference is passed through a low pass filter and measured by the embedded computer. The measurement is the compared against an internal customizable threshold which determines if enough force has been applied.

Possible Further Improvements

Motor Feedback System

While the gear ratio could be changed to enlarge the freedom of rotation of the motor in future iterations, the potentiomter itself is not the optimal solution in this situation. A more suitable, but perhaps more sophisticated solution, can be to use a servo motor with relative movement feedback.

Experimental Results

TODO: add experimental result data and impressions

Temporary ref label

[1] - Regarding behavior of snoozing, defined as setting multiple sequential alarms

[2] - Effects of snoozing, possible extension of waking up period and result as a fear of oversleeping.

[3] - Relating to motor strength and state of weakness

[4] - Multi-modal environmental effects don't really stack

[5] - Sound wake up effectiveness

[6] - Cardiovascular respose to static exercise

References

[1] Stephen M. Mattingly, Gonzalo Martinez, Jessica Young, Meghan K. Cain, Aaron Striegel, (2022), Snoozing: an examination of a common method

of waking, Sleep Research Society

[2] Keiko Ogawa, Emi Kaizuma‑Ueyama, Mitsuo Hayashi, (2022), Effects of using a snooze alarm on sleep

inertia after morning awakening, Journal of Physiological Anthropology

[3] PAUL R. JEANNERET, WILSE B. WEBB, (1963), Strength of grip on arousal from full night's sleep, Perceptual and Motor Skills

[4] Carolina Campanella, Kunjoon Byun, Araliya Senerat, Linhao Li, Rongpeng Zhang, Sara Aristizabal, Paige Porter, Brent Bauer, (2024), The Efficacy of a Multimodal Bedroom-Based ‘Smart’ Alarm System on Mitigating the Effects of Sleep Inertia, Clocks & Sleep.

[5] Dorothy Bruck, Ian Thomas, (2007), Waking effectiveness of alarm (auditory, visual and tactile) for adults who are hard of hearing

[6] Eino Hietanen, (1984), Cardiovascular responses to static exercise, Scandinavian Journal of Work Environment & Health