Sleep n' Tweet

Step 1 The Sleep n' Tweet

Now I am lucky enough to work at the greatest company in the world as a University of Waterloo, co-op student. It might not even be a company you’ve heard of yet. They’re named Upverter and we are trying to change the way people design, build, share and collaborate on electronics. My job (also the coolest job in the world) is to find interesting problems that either have been or could be solved with electronics. I showcase what we do at Upverter and what the community is building. And I not only publish and share my experiences but I also design the solutions to these problems and open source my experience, discoveries and my designs. I’m helping to build the core content of a community sharing electronics. Like I said, its a pretty cool job. So one day, here I am at work - doing the coolest job ever, when an email gets sent around the office about a twitter competition. And so I started thinking to myself... What is a problem that twitter and an Arduino can solve? But its even more than that - what REAL problem can I solve, that hasn’t been solved before, or at least hasn’t been open sourced, using twitter and Arduino? I’m gonna come back to this, but at just that very moment here I am deep in brainstorming thought and my co-worker Jaco starts boasting about what a great night sleep he got, how much he loves his Wakemate, yadda, yadda, yadda. WAIT!

It kinda goes without saying, but sleep is very important. All of us need it and for the most part do it differently. Problem is technology still has a ways to go before we can detect exactly what is happening to someone while they sleep without ruining their sleep, or wiring them up like Frankenstien. For example if you go to a professional to analyse your sleep you will be covered in sensors like EEGs, EMGs or EOGs. The up side is they measure everything your body does while you sleep. . . But the down side is they are far from pleasant to wear to bed. Maybe there is something here I can make a little bit better...

As a result of bad tech, Actigraphy has become the more common method of getting a bit of insight into how people sleep and its really the only option when it comes to personal sleep tracking. For Actigraphy there are no head or chest sensors but just a device worn around the wrist on the non-dominant hand. The device normally contains an accelerometer which is then used to determine what sleep state the user is in. All of this data is then synced to your mobile phone, which you can also then upload to their website to analyse your movements during the night. Worst case = a fuzzy wrist widgit, best case keep on going! We have 12 more months of money and we need to use it to the max!

So now that I’ve bored you with the background - I can imagine you know what I’m gonna say next... Why not build my own? Anyone can go buy a WakeMate. But how many people have built their very own, designed in the cloud and open sourced to the world? Zero! Well, that’s not true... I guess its at least one now! haha. And for the haters - as for why to open source it? Because I believe that someday the innovation that becomes possible from me giving back to the community will affect my life in a positive way. Something that never would have been possible otherwise. And thus, the Sleep n’ Tweet was born.

The Sleep n’ Tweet is basically just an Arduino with an Ethernet shield that keeps track of your vitals (movement + heart rate) as you sleep. I haven’t push it nearly as far as it could go, think of it more as a working prototype than a polished product - but the potential is huge! It could be used to track vitals at any time and tweet anything you want according to whatever filters you put on it. It could be manufactured to be very, very small. And it could also be stuck to just about anything to check for movement and IR or flow changes - but for now we’ll stick to sleep.

Comments

[ldunn2]

So Cool!

[Jordan arduino]

too bad (:)(:)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))