Wakey

We all struggle to get out of bed at some points. Whether it may be that you struggled to complete a large project and were up all night trying to finish it or were out with your friends late on the weekends, there’s always that one time-sensitive thing you have to do in the morning. It’s not that you are apathetic to your responsibilities, but it almost feels like regardless of how many alarms you set or how loud they may be, you never notice them in the morning. That’s where Wakey comes in. Can’t wake up to sound in the morning, or feel you have gone deaf to alarms? Wakey uses whatever measures necessary to get you up and out of bed. Utilizing machine learning, Wakey will try to use a different technique every morning to wake you up. Current research shows sound is actually a horribly ineffective way to break out of deep sleep and rather, senses such as temperature, touch, smell, and especially things that arouse fear are surprisingly useful. Wakey’s list of techniques to wake you up to follow these trends. 

Wakey’s Techniques:

- Heat up: In the summer, turning on the heating 30 mins before wake up

- Cooldown: In the winter, turning on the air conditioning 30 mins before wake up

-Alarm lights: Flickering the lights on and off

- Refreshing mist: Spraying a cold mist onto your face

- Deal with it now, or deal with a wet bed later: Balancing ice on your face or abdomen that slowly melts and makes sleeping uncomfortable

- Presser: Slowly pressing an object onto your body that increases in pressure to cause discomfort

- Shocking: Administer a slight, nonlethal shock to bare skin

- Can you hear me now?: An alarm that slowly gets closer and closer to your ears as time approaches

- What’s that smell?: Release a rotten food smell that increases in pungency as the time to wake up gets closer

- Slapper: Slapping mechanism that will lightly smack you in the face in the morning

- Friend: Gently taps you and whispers “hey __name__, it’s time to wake up”

- Thief: Slow steals your pillow and blanket from you and puts it on the other side of the room.

- Hide and Seek: Plays a really obnoxious sound while it hides in your room forcing you to get out of bed and turn it off

- Embarasser: Sends embarrassing texts or tweets out on your behalf if you don’t get up

The form of Wakey is composed of a 2-foot robot that has an effective and power arm for a variety of purposes. The body contains all the necessary materials and features to implement the techniques mentions early like electric prongs, ice maker, water sprayer, smell container, etc. It will be connected to your other smart home appliances like lights and heating to allow it to control those facets of the house/room when needed. I will sit at your bedside and detect whether or not you are asleep. I will also be equipped with many sensors to detect if you are awake if you are still in bed, what stage of sleep you are in, etc. to be better informed on how to wake you up. After being told what time it wants to wake you up, it will randomize a test for you to have to deal with in the morning. It will then collect this data to make Wakey better not only better for you, but for everyone who owns a Wakey and what techniques are the most effective. Once it starts noticing trends in your sleep patterns, it will try to make them more consistent by waking you up at that time every day. For example, if your earliest class it at 8:30 am and you wake up at 7 am to get ready, it will try to wake you up at 7 every day, until you are at the point that you don’t need an alarm clock to wake you up. 

While these benefits are useful, there are some downsides. In the case, you have been consistently waking up at 9 am, but for some reason you had an important assignment due Friday morning but no Friday class, you have likely slept very late. But for the sake of consistency, Wakey would wake you up at 9 am whether you went to sleep at 11 pm or 6 am. The customer would then get sick and tired of the device constantly interrupting their daily lifestyle and toss the product. Another major drawback is the sharing of personal information. In the case that a user was not okay with the sharing of their sleep history, this would be ethically and morally wrong. It would also mean that even if you were okay with your personal information being shared, hackers could then access this from the companies servers and then disrupt your life even further by triggering your alarm at inopportune times. It is particularly alarming (pun intended) that since Wakey has access to your social media information and is connected to your other home appliances, hackers could even go on to steal more important personal information without you finding out. 

Here are a couple of recommendations to IoT designers. First, while it is nice to have your product be as beneficial as possible to the customer and adding more features to accomplish that is generally a good idea. If this poses a lifestyle change, it is more effective to gradually change the user’s routine and allow for exceptions when explicitly stated by the user. For example, with Wakey, the user isn't allowed to set a time to wake up later than their consistent wake-up time, so even if the user knew they wouldn't get much sleep, there is nothing they can do about it besides getting rid of the device altogether. So allowing the user to decide is important, even if it seems counterproductive to accomplishing their goals. Second, if you are ever dealing with personal information, everything should be localized on the system itself and encrypted. The average person generally isn’t the target of a hacker and even if one system gets compromised, it is only for one user, not everyone. Hackers tend to target large databases of information, so having a large database of sleep information, along with social media and smart home information, means a lot of personal data is at risk.