Motivation: To design a pillow that helps college students fall asleep quicker, sleep more comfortably and wake up on time.

As part of ‘The Management and Technology Summer Institute’ at the University of Pennsylvania and Wharton School of Business, I, along with my team, designed ‘Nite for our final project. ‘Nite is a smart pillow, as the poster we designed below illustrates:

Here’s how the four features of the smart pillow work:

Temperature Regulation

A liquid, cooled by a thermo-electric cooler, is pumped through thin pipes that run through the inside of the pillow in a closed loop. By conduction, the heat from the pillow is transferred to the cooler liquid reducing the temperature of the pillow. The cool liquid (that is warmed up by the pillow) is continuously cooled as it passes the thermo-electric cooler allowing continuous cooling.

With the help of an Arduino code we developed a system that acts like a thermostat, i.e., the pillow only cools when its temperature is higher than the temperature the user sets. The image below shows the process using a flow chart:

As shown, the cooler and pump is only turned on if the temperature sensor detects that the pillow’s temperature is higher than the desired temperature.

Fullness Control

Through market research we found that some people like their pillows to be thick and firm while some like their pillows to be thinner and flimsy. We incorporated this into our design with fullness or fluffiness control.

To achieve this, an inflatable latex ballon is inserted into the pillow. The user can then fill or remove air to control the fullness of their pillow.

An in-built alarm

Among teenagers we found a huge need for more effective alarms.

Our pillow offers a solution in that it contains motors that vibrate inserted into the cross section of the pillow. It also contains LED’s inserted into the cross section. Either one of these or both (depending on the user’s preference) can be automatically turned on at the time the user sets his/her alarm. The motors will vibrate right under your head and the light will flash close to your eyes, giving the user a greater chance of waking up.

An L-shape

Our final innovation is to accommodate for the fact that people like hugging something when they sleep. Instead of having additional pillows to hug we made our pillow L-shaped, which makes it huggable.