In human life, sleep is the period when the body rejuvenates. Two body systems regulate the timing and amount of sleep – the sleep/wake homeostasis and the circadian biological clock. Depending on external circumstances and the health of the individual, people experience different levels of alertness and sleepiness throughout the day. After being awake for a long time, the sleep/wake homeostasis tells the body it is accumulating the need for sleep and that causes us to feel sleepy. It also regulates the period of sleep throughout the night, to let us make up for the hours we will remain awake. The sleep/wake homeostasis balances the wakefulness and sleep periods in the body.

We also have an internal circadian biological clock that regulates the timing of wakefulness and sleepiness throughout the day. The circadian rhythm rises and dips at different times of the day. Typically, an adult has the strongest sleep drive between 2:00-4:00 am and again in the afternoon between 1:00-3:00 pm. However, this varies from person to person.

Sometimes, due to various reasons, things go wrong with the body systems regulating the timing and amount of sleep. Doctors advise monitoring your sleep to know where things are going wrong. However, this becomes a “Catch 22” situation – if you sleep, it is impossible to monitor how you sleep and you cannot sleep if you are monitoring. Now, there is a solution to this dilemma – a measurement pillow.

A chiropractor, Rick Loos, founder of the company Proper Pillow, is all set to develop a pillow containing a set of sensors to monitor the quality of your sleep. The pillow will monitor your sleep position throughout your sleeping time, collect the data and transmit them to an app on your smartphone.

Proper Pillow Plus will have a network of pressure sensors to collect the data. It will use BLE or Bluetooth Low Energy to transmit this data. Of course, this requires a power source, a sensor network with ADCs, and a micro-controller with a BLE radio. Normally, all data collected will remain stored until you decide to transmit it to your smartphone. Watch the pillow doing its work here. Proper Pillow also provides better sleep by giving its user a proper spine alignment.

According to Dr. Loos, the Proper Pillow Plus will contain 9-12 pressure sensors, a digitizer board, a micro-controller with Bluetooth capabilities, a battery, a microphone and a temperature probe. It will use 3-point redundancy to detect correctly the head and neck of the sleeper. The microphone will record various sounds such as the person’s breathing and external sounds such as a dog’s bark. The pillow will also record the ambient temperature to know if the sleeper woke up due to changes in temperature. The pressure sensors will determine how much time the user spent on his back or on his side.

Usually, the hardware will remain in low-power mode to maximize power efficiency. The algorithm wakes the hardware only when there is a change is pressure due to the sleeper’s movements. The slow changes in pressure and temperature permit low-speed digitization.