Design Brief

Though people have argued this topic intensely, technology has surely made human life easier in many ways. Some brilliant designs that demonstrate the benefits of human-machine interaction have emerged since the second half of last century. The market of environmentally responsible designs, smart technologies and wearable technologies have sharply risen in the last decade. Technology has also brought people closer together, despite obstacles of distance and time through inventions like social networks, teleconferencing and messaging .

One particular context that interests me is how technology can influence communication between mothers and their children. From this general interest, I began researching opportunities to make an improvement to the bond between mother and child. After some thought, I developed my concept, the ¨BigSister¨ is a baby monitoring system that helps mothers by making their job easier, as well as allowing babies to have a wonderful sleep.

Babies are fragile and need to be kept an eye on every second. This is tiring for parents and the first two years of a baby ´s life can be important for the rest of their adult life. In addition we live in a modern society with such a fast life pattern, some new parents have huge problems to be company and take care of their babies. Any product that can reduce a mother ´s burden, even if only a little bit, will be welcome at such an important time.

The duration of sleep of infants is 19.8 hours in the fourth week of life and gradually decreases to 15.6 hours in the 28th week. * Even when they grow to be 1-2 years old the bed will still be the most important thing in their brand-new life. So I think the duration of sleeping is an important part of baby's life, designs which is supposed to improve baby's quality of life and ease mother's burden should be something related to baby cot or around the cot area.

Goals, The User group & Functions that solve a problem

The main user group for ¨BigSister¨ is new-mothers and their newborn babies.

Babies fall asleep faster when they hear something they are familiar with.* Mothers can send real-time voice recordings to babies to comfort them. It provides a gentle and soft environment that allows babies to go to sleep with joy and sense of safety.

During the sleeping time, lighting level plays an important role in terms of the quality of sleeping .*

Babies have sensitive skin and feel the temperature outside and can ´t change the situation when something is too hot or cold, other than by crying. For example, that's why mothers have to put their elbows in the water to check the water temperature when showering their babies. ¨BigSister¨ can detect the real-time temperature of the cot, to ensure babies fall asleep in a suitable and comfortable environment. In the future process of designing and producing this system, I ´m hopeful the temperature and humidity will also be controllable.After all, the temperature may be a more important issue for the baby ´s health than originally thought.*

¨BigSister¨ has two associated part- An interface available through the mobile phone and a physical device which includes the effectors and sensors.

Mothers can monitor the baby´s sleeping behaviour through the video window on the mobile app, as well as monitor the lighting, temperature and humidity levels. The sliding-bar allows the mother to control the light in the room.

If the baby moves in a significant range, the text ¨baby is awake¨ will be shown on the screen. If the text show 5 times, there will be a message sent to mother´s phone as a reminder. Minor amounts of movement do not register any alerts. If the baby begins moving or crying, the mother is able to try calming her baby by pressing the button on the lower half of the screen. The voice recording will be sent and played gently for the baby.

User Interface.

In terms of designing the interface, I choose a blue-white colour to highlight the feeling of clean, quiet and cosy. People is more willing to believe what they see, in that case mothers may what to see their babies's image more. I put the big monitoring camera window in the middle of top side, so that when they open the application the first thing come to them is the live video of babies. The visualised data of lighting, temperature and humidity is below the camera window, followed by a light controlling bar. The button on the bottom for speaker is huge and easy to press. All controllable part are on the lower half of interface, which is more convenient for thumb-press.

physical prototype

For physical prototype, the wire design is the main part. Main challenge is that how to connect all the sensors with the minimum crossed wires (to avoid possibility of short circuit). Beside, because this product is designed for babies to look at, colourful appearance is also an important factor to be considered.

Shortlist Of Components:

1* Lilypad Arduino board
1* Infrared camera (replaced with default camera in Mac OSX in prototype)
1* Audio player (default audio player in Mac OSX in prototype)
3* Lilypad white LEDs
1* Lilypad temperature sensor
1* Lilypad light sensor
1* Humidity sensor
1* Needle set
1* Conductive thread bobbin


Running software environment:

Arduino
Processing
Libraries:
Opencv
ControlP5
Video
Minim
Arduino Frimatta

Problems encountered & how to solve them

When transformed from Arduino Uno board to Lilypad, everything stayed the same but the data read from the humidity sensor and temperature sensors were different.
When needling the Lilypad to the coloured felt, because I sewed the Conductive thread too loose, a short circuit was caused and the electricity burnt a hole on the felt.
When creating the speaker button on interface in processing, I could not apply an image (icon) to the button. I solved this problem by not using a button, instead using an image and setting the area for mouse-click.

Conclusion & reflection

I am satisfied with the abundant knowledge and skills awarded during the process of learning. I hope to use these skills in more creative practice in the future. The controller from the mobile side is not functional enough. If I had more time to develop this concept, I would make the temperature and humidity of the baby´s room also controllable. And if being more creative about it, maybe we can have a automatic curtain to adjust the lighting level in the room instead of using LED lights. In addition we can even have a automatic toy set for kids to keep them entertained. All these elements can be controlled in the mobile side.

The infrared camera and audio player are replaced in current prototype, but hopefully I can develop it into real-working circuit with real infrared camera and audio player.

Author: Muzi Hu