Snoozle -- A Robotic Pillow That Helps You Go to Sleep

Abstract

Not getting enough sleep is detrimental to our health and productivity, yet we have difficulty to maintain consistent bedtimes. Technological solutions to this problem mostly focus on detecting sleep patterns and providing feedback on them. We felt there was an opportunity for a perspective that concentrates on one's subjective experience. We propose Snoozle, an actuated pillow that supports consistent bedtimes by inviting users to bed, and improves the sleeping experience by enhancing the feeling of co-presence. In this proposal, we present how the concept of Snoozle developed from structured brainstorms, storyboards and sketches. We discuss the actuated pillow behavior and the envisioned interaction, and we detail our next steps.

Flipper 2.0

“…The Snoozle project aimed at helping people sleep using an interactive pillow that lured people to bed. Flipper was used to steer the multi-modal behaviour of the pillow [28]. This is an example where a non-humanoid agent is controlled by Flipper.…”

The Design of Robothings : Non-Anthropomorphic and Non-Verbal Robots to Promote Children’s Collaboration Through Play

“…We have contributed to the development of Bubble-Bot [223], a robothing capable of influencing humans' interpersonal behaviors enabling serendipitous interactions among people by bursting bubbles at people. Another example is the Snoozle [381] a robothing we have developed to influence people to maintain consistent bedtimes. Overall, the health and well-being domains offer an exciting test-bed for robothings that is worthwhile to explore.…”

Hey robot, what do you think? How children learn with a social robot

“…Finally, we conclude with Chapter 9 where we discuss this work in the broader context of educational HRI and reflect on the main contributions of this thesis. 1 Fun fact: components of the EASEL software architecture have since been used in various other projects to control the behaviour of a diverse range of robots, such as Eye-Pi [49], R3D3 [138], and Snoozle [212]…”

“…Regarding technical aspects, in related projects we have shown that the architecture is flexible and modular enough to support different robots (e.g. [49,212]) and interaction contexts (e.g. [38,138]).…”

“…Variants of this architecture have since been used in other projects: in De-Enigma[38] it is used to control a Zeno robot that practices facial features and expressions with autistic children; in COUCH[196] the architecture is used to manage a council of virtual coaches that help older adults achieve healthy living goals; in R3D3[138] the architecture controls the behaviour of a robot & virtual agent receptionist duo; and in Snoozle[212] it animates a non-anthropomorphic robotic pillow that entices users to maintain healthy sleeping habits.…”