[MUSIC]
Everyone wants a good night's sleep, right?
[UNKNOWN]
might have the tech to help you with its robot pillow.
Now, Julian is here.
Thank you for joining me today.
Thank you soi much.
I'm so excited.
This is A robot pillow.
Now what on earth does that mean?
Why is it a robot?
It's a robot, because it can sense its environment and see if you're asleep or awake.
And--
It has a camera in it?
Is it watching me as I sleep?
That's kind of creepy.
So, it senses movement as well as it has an acceloromator, a CO2 sensor, and a microphone, so it has an indication of what is sleeping and what is awake.
But the measurement itself it's not that interesting.
It's what we do with the data in real time to actually to have a tailored approach on the helping you sleep.
Okay, I wanna hold it.
Let me hold this.
Sure.
So what's the, it's quite heavy.
Yeah.
Why is it so chuncky, like its, you designed it to kind of have it.
In this position, and hold it against your chest as you sleep?
But why is it so heavy?
So, it was meant to be hold, as if you could snuggle it, spoon it just as a partner, as a cat or a dog.
That's why it's also the weight, so it feels and is perceived as a little, living being.
It's breathing, guys, it's breathing.
I'm feeling it moving in and out.
It's like a puppy.
It is, yeah-
This is amazing.
It's like a puppy.
Its moving in and out, I wow.
Its a really interesting sensation, its very comforting.
Mm-hm.
> It feels like I have a living being next to me.
Uh-uh.
I do
Do you want to talk about how you developed this?
There's kind of a cute story there isn't it?
Tell me about that.
Yeah, so I'm a robotics engineer, and it all started out as an academy project within the University of Technology, Delft, in the Netherlands.
The pillow\g for sleep is a person frustration because of my mom who is suffering from insomnia.
She was addicted to sleep medication and I wanted to give her something that was a more natural approach On solving sleep, and since I was into soft robotics, after a lot of iterations and prototypes I gave one to my mom and now she is having one and falling asleep way better.>>Seriously?
Brownie points, you are going to be the best son ever, helping your mum sleep, my goodness.
Is this because you were a baby, you were keeping her up all night?>>Maybe, maybe.>>Making up for it now.
Okay, so, I want you to show me kind of like the app controls
Yep.
But it is a robot of course, so it is an app-connected thing, you can do a bunch of things in this app.
Run me through a couple of the functionalities that you can do.
The robot is measuring things, but the most important thing is that it is breathing, just as you said.
I know, it's-
You can feel the physical sensation of the falling and rising of the breath
You can have your own breathing.
It should be calibrated to your personal breathing rhythm, rather than a universal one.
So we have all kinds of breathing exercises that you can do.
You can also set your personal sounds.
It could be story telling or a boring political debate to get you to sleep.
I guess that's a good thing to put you to sleep.
Yeah, it is.
I'll listen to that.
And here's the timer, so you can say when should it turn
turn off.
So you don't need to worry about setting it during the night or that it will turn off.
It all goes autonomous and automatically.>>That's.>> It is just to set the personal preference.>> Yeah that is really cool.
Why is it designed like this?
It is kind of like a little peanut.
Uh-huh.
Kinda looks like, why this particular design?
Yeah.
So I've been studying people sleeping.
And I've seen that the most frequent, the most comfortable position was actually that of spooning.
So you also get that feeling of affection of really holding something.
And another thing is that all the sensors are back here, so if you hold it like this, you can really wrap around it, and we can measure your heart rate and the breathing very well.
So there's a lot of different sleep tools on the market.
When it comes to monitoring.
Obviously, there's beds that can kind of vibrate and wake up your partner if they snore.
They can keep a track of those, even tools that can kind of keep an eye on, like if you're susceptible to having heart attacks or other kind of conditions like that.
Is that the aim of this?
Like are you trying to kind of collect all this data and then feed it back to the user?
<< So data isn't the most important thing in our product, it's [UNKNOWN] something we put to use with real time actuation.
So where most sleep devices, like there are tons of them out there, they are tracking sleep.
But we want to make the next step in technology That actually does something with the data.
And that is something I think is really interesting.
And a lot of other companies will be doing it in the next couple of years.
Yeah.
So you're not tracking that I basically tried to go to sleep and then stayed up all night watching Black Mirror.
That's not what, you're not interested in that, right?
[LAUGH]
No, no.
We are looking, however, into the tailored presence kind of thing.
So if you're away from home We could be at the breathing of your husband, or even the sounds of your husband
what?!
so he will be with you all
are you serious?
you could like have the breathing pattern of your partner or baby or something like that in this?
Yeah, you could do that.
So we've actually seen some examples.
For example, an elderly person who was suffering from dementia Who lost her husband and we reincarnated her husband into the robotic and it actually made her feel way more comfortable.
No way.
As in where she was waking up all night, yeah.
Wow, well that's a really nice application of that.
My goodness.
So it's very tactile.
I kind of wanna run my hands over it.
You wanna pet it.
I do want to pet it.
It is like a puppy.
I swear it feels like that.
So I have to say I did take this to bed.
That sounds really weird.
I slept with how do you say that?
You go to bed with a robot right?
How else do you phrase this?
I put it in my bed and it laid next to me.
You snuggle up with a soft companion robotic.
I know.
I wanted to try it out and Give you some of my experiences because it's such an interesting thing to go to bed with a robot.
You would feel like it would probably be like a super clinical thing, but I actually felt like this was incredibly comforting.
The breathing, I keep saying it's like a puppy, but it really felt like I had a small creature next to me.
So it's designed to kind of help you fall asleep faster.
But I'm a tough cookie.
I do all my thinking before bed.
And I'm solving all the problems and this is how I'm gonna fix everything the next day.
So I am, my brain is working at 100 miles an hour.
So I don't think it will help me fall asleep faster.
But I will say, For me, I feel like when I woke up, my alarm went off at 6 AM.
I woke up and I was like, I'm alert, I'm awake, I'm refreshed.
Uh-huh.
I felt like I had a had a really good night's sleep.
Uh-huh.
Even though it went off at about obviously an hour after that was the timer,
I still kinda kept it close next to me, and I kept snuggling it throughout the night.
That's great.
Yeah.
So I don't know, I need to replicate this.
I don't know, CS is a stressful place.
CS is really stressful.
If you're able to sleep at CS, that's the ultimate proof.
Seriously, my goodness.
Well if I could sleep at CS with the robot, I think it's doing a good job.
Okay, finally, quickly where can we get this?
You can get in Indiegogo we are accepting preorders now.
So it is somnox.nl and everything will be there to have your own snuggy robot by July 2018.
Okay, Julian thank you so much for being with us today.
