MFA project at SVA // Concept + Construction + Coding (Arduino)

Sleeping is one of my weaker skills, and for some time I'd tracked patterns and quality with iPhone apps like Sleep Cycle. A view of my sleep activity was meaningful and useful data, and I liked the ingenuity of using the iPhone's accelerometer as an instrument for monitoring depth of sleep.

Having played with various sensors in our Physical Computing class, and used them to manipulate lights or other electronics, Leroy Tellez and I decided to build a more 'physical' version of a sleep tracking app. Rather than glance at a bright iPhone screen on waking up, you'd see a representation of your sleep with a kinetic wooden object.

A simple proof-of-concept, we chose to represent each hour of sleep with one wooden dowel, which would gradually swing from one side to the other depending on how much motion our accelerometer sensed over an hour (more motion means lighter sleep). The dowels were controlled by mini servo motors.

A future version would refine the physical construction, and use a more granular measure than one dowel per hour to show a more nuanced wave pattern.