@Home - Connected Bedroom Ecosystem

Vision:

Imagine that you could bring a part of your home with you. International students that study abroad often get homesick and want to be reminded of their home. Our bedroom IoT ecosystem will help remind people about their home through a sensorial experience by connecting it to the weather in their country. 

Goal: 

The goal of our ecosystem is to bridge the connection gap between a student's new place of residence and their homes, in essence we want to bring their home life into their new life. 

Team Roles:

• Vision Lead - Xenia Kolesnikov

• Developer - Benjamin Fisher
• Designer - Hanyuan Zhang
• Liaison -  Isabelle Mills-Tannenbaum
  

• Developer - Mark Davidson
  
• Designer - Janice Chen
  
• Liaison - Logan Uretsky
  

• Developer - Hua Fan 
  
• Designer - Manchit Rajani  
  
• Liaison - Violet Guo

Design Process:

Once our team agreed to focus our ecosystem on bringing a student's home life into their new life, we brainstormed different issues and ways to activate those home memories. 

We discussed the power of senses to recall memories. As a team, we decided to further explore our challenge by trying to recall memories of home through different senses. Our team decided to develop three different prototypes. One that reminds a student of their home through a visual cue. A second one that brings different sounds of their home country to their bedroom and a third object that dispenses different but familiar smells. All three connected devices are being triggered by the home country weather of the student.

Below are the initial sketches and concepts of each connected device.

Solution Prototypes and Viability of Solutions:

Below are high level descriptions of our prototypes as well as links to our final prototypes gallery pages.

Ambient Light Device:

Our ambient light can successfully connect to the weather of the user's hometown and display a weather icon to indicate how the weather is there 

Link to Prototype Gallery Page: http://integratedinnovation.xsead.cmu.edu/gallery/projects/home-sight 

Sound of Home Device:

Our Sound of Home Device helps users remember their hometown by emitting comforting sounds to "bring" them back to their homes. Based on the users hometown weather data, our device emits different types of sounds that would be typical of that weather pattern. 

Link to Prototype Gallery Page:  http://integratedinnovation.xsead.cmu.edu/gallery/projects/home-sound 

Smells Like Rain Device: 

Our Smells Like Rain Device leverages the associations individuals make with certain smells to comfort them and remind them of their home. Based on the users  hometown weather data, our device releases a different scent into the air.  

Link to Prototype Gallery Page: 

http://integratedinnovation.xsead.cmu.edu/gallery/projects/home-smell 

Next Steps and Future Iterations:

Next steps for our bedroom IoT ecosystem could include to:

• Develop a bank of different sounds and smells to support our product personalization. This is an ambitious goal but we believe that we can start small by offering a small range of choices and as we expand our product we could partner with perfumeries to develop customized smells. Purchasers of our products could then customize the smell and sounds to their state
• Understand how we provide additional sensorial information to not only say what the weather is back home but also understand what season they are in (e.g., winter, spring, summer and fall) 
• Think about the installation  process of our ecosystem. We should further think about the installation of these devices and how we can make the process easy and seamless. Studying companies such as Nest can provides us with information about best practices that we could use in the installation of our bedroom ecosystem
• Explore how to make the ambient light device more abstract. As recommendation that was raised on our demo is it understand how we could make the icons of our weather partners more abstract so any culture can understand what is going on
• Include a two-way communication between user and their familiar in order to strengthen those connections 

Reflections on Success:

As a team we were able to leverage our strengths in different fields (e.g., engineering, design, business) to develop high quality prototypes. We also keep communications open between the groups to ensure that our updated designs and functionalities worked well in concert with the other prototypes. We found it helpful to create a specific use case and target user that we could reference as we designed to ensure we were solving for the right pain points. Keeping our objects modular was also another important lesson learned given that changes in the circuit or internal components of the devices impacted the aesthetic and size of our prototypes. 

As a team, we were pleased with how each prototype explored the feeling of being back home through a different sensory input. We would welcome the opportunity to continue to work on this ecosystem or work together on a new challenge.