Hello world!

We are Griffin and Alexa and this is going to be our blog for the ESE 350 Final Project. For anyone who is reading this, we wanted to provide an opening post just describing what our project, The Auto-Adjust Pillow, is, what it does, and why we’re making it. We hope you enjoy our blog!

The Auto-Adjust Pillow

Our project, the auto-adjust pillow, is a pillow that addresses the problem of stiff neck, a problem that many people face every night they sleep. Stiff neck occurs because when people sleep, they generally stay in the same position in the middle of the night without moving, and often since these positions are unnatural for the body, they can wake up with a stiff neck. As such, alongside Dr. Gooneratne Nalaka, we wanted to create an embedded device that could address these problems.

In order to address these problems, our device is going to be able to inflate and deflate at regular intervals in the middle of the night in order to move the patients neck to keep them from having a stiff neck. However, we don’t want to wake individuals due to their head moving, so we plan on using pressure sensors and heartrate as a measure of sleep state.

We first will use pressure sensors to both model the head as well as determine if the individual has moved their head recently (as people generally move their head more in lighter sleep), and then we will later integrate in heart rate sensors in order to measure the resting heart rate and better determine when it lowers and thus when they are sleeping. Finally, we have to build the actual pillow and the inflation mechanisms in order to allow it to inflate and deflate.