A product that assists people who are suffering from Insomnia
Introduction & Motivation
Chronic sleep deprivation is a common sleep disorder that affects all ages, especially young adults. Many contributing factors include school and work schedules, inconsistent sleep habits, and mental health conditions. According to the Journal of Sleep Research, an international survey of 17,000 college students were sleeping 21% less than the recommended sleep duration. Another study of insomnia among students showed a composite insomnia prevalence of 18.5%.
There are many common sleep disorders, and our focus will be on insomnia. Insomnia is a sleep disorder that restricts people from falling asleep or staying asleep, and affects their energy, mood, and health.
As college students ourselves, we can relate to these frustrations, so we designed Snooze: a device that can help young adults with insomnia improve their quality of sleep.
Related Work & Competitive Analysis
Our product’s main competitors are Sleepon Go2Sleep Tracker, Tempur-Pedic SleepTracker, and Sleep Cycle.
- Go2Sleep Tracker: A wearable ring that provides health and sleep data, and alerts the user about any abnormal findings. They can also measure heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and sleep stage status.
- Tempur-Pedic SleepTracker: A non wearable sensor placed under your mattress that syncs with an app to display health metrics. It can monitor sleep stages, quality, and duration in addition to bedroom atmosphere.
- Sleep Cycle: An app that records and monitors sleep patterns, displays statistics, and provides recommendations to improve sleep. Users can learn about their sleeping patterns on its Statistics page.
What makes Snooze different? Our device not only tracks metrics to monitor sleep, it also soothes the user to sleep through its unique features: an essential oil dispenser, calming music, and a dynamic background. Snooze’s voice assistant also guides the user to sleep by prompting them with methods to induce sleep.
A disadvantage of Snooze is that we extract most of our data from external devices such as an Apple Watch or iPhone. However, Snooze can still independently track sleep cycles, sleeping habits, and audio such as snoring, sleep talking, etc. Snooze can collect this data to create analytics and curate recommendations to improve specific sleep problems.
Design Problem & Target User Group
How can we improve the sleep quality and wellbeing of people with insomnia?
Our target user group will be adults, specifically ages 18 to 30, that are impacted by stress, irregular schedules, or unhealthy food and drink consumption. Some people with insomnia say they feel like their lives are taken over by it and struggle to keep it under control. It can be extremely frustrating to deal with insomnia every night and keep a consistent effort to improve their sleep quality.
Key Design Requirements & Design Rationale
Essential Oil Dispenser
According to Amerisleep, essential oils can promote better sleep, relax the body, and reduce levels of stress and anxiety. Snooze has an option to dispense essential oils by the click of a button or by voice command.
Sleep Tracking Analytics
By collecting data through devices such as the Apple Watch or iPhone, our Analytics page can display sleep duration, frequency of waking up, and the body’s health status such as heart rate or body temperature. Over time, the device will discover patterns in sleeping behavior and set weekly goals for the user to improve their sleep, such as sending notifications throughout the day reminding the user to get some exercise and to drink chamomile tea about an hour before trying to fall asleep.
Dynamic background
The device is equipped with a dynamic background that changes throughout the day based on the user’s location. If it’s 12:30 PM, the wallpaper will be a sunny day. If it’s 9:00 PM, it will shift to a starry night.
The dynamic background can help users associate the time with time of day. When the starry night background appears after sunset, it may encourage users to get ready for bed. This feature is also useful if the user does not want to look at their phone or watch to see the time during the middle of the night, exposing their eyes to blue light.
Calming Music
Playing music before or during sleep can relax our users and promote sleepiness. Our device has its own calming sounds such as classical music or nature sounds. Users will also have the option to play their own preferred songs by connecting to their Apple Music or Spotify account. Our interface is easy to navigate through touchscreen or through our interactive voice assistant. If a user wishes to play music, they can say a phrase such as: “Hey Snooze, play my piano playlist”.
Fixed & Range Alarms
Users can choose to wake up at their lightest sleep cycle within a specified time frame. With this feature, the user can feel less tired waking up in the morning. For example, if a user wants to wake up by 7:30 at the latest, the alarm will wake them up within a specified range, for example, 30 minutes. The alarm will sound anywhere between 7:00–7:30 AM, whenever the user is in their lightest sleep cycle.
Access our Figma link by clicking here
Watch our full demo video by clicking here
Discussion / Future Work / Conclusion
Our next step is usability testing to obtain additional feedback. We will conduct a study with adults from ages 18 to 30 who have insomnia. In the first stage, we will conduct interviews to observe how participants interact with our prototype. We want to ensure that our product is easy to navigate, doesn’t violate any usability heuristics, and actually addresses user needs. After multiple rounds of refining Snooze based on its feedback, we will continue onto the next stage which determines if people with insomnia actually benefit from this device over a period of time. We will check in with our participants frequently to record and analyze their progress. We wish to measure if they are waking up less frequently, falling asleep faster, and staying awake for 20 minutes or less after initially falling asleep.
Team members: Emily Zheng, Gabrielle Trilling, Malay Kalavadia, Peter Lim
