I like to see projects that solve real life problems. It is design thinking at it's best. Here is a cool
Indiegogo project from a friend and former housemate of mine. It is called
SAMi - the Sleep Activity Monitor. He and his wife had a son who was having epileptic seizures. They created a night vision camera with motion detection specifically designed to alert parents when a child is having a seizure. Apparently epileptic seizures can be dangerous and can happen while sleeping. For a parent, the options are mostly pretty grim. You can get a baby monitor and be woken up every time your child makes noise, and yet it can miss quiet events. You can get a bed motion sensor, which works pretty well, but it only captures rhythmic motion and it doesn't go with you when you travel.
The SAMi Sleep Activity Monitor gives a live video feed in complete darkness so you can check in on your child, senses motion and triggers an alarm if it detects what looks like a seizure and, it will make a recording of the motion events which can be reviewed with your doctor. It helps that Charles is a digital signal processing guru, so he was able to tune an algorithm to detect likely seizures. See the
video of the demo. Nice work!
Please help Charles and Cynthia by supporting the project on
Indiegogo, and consider telling your friends about the project. This is the kind of thing that should be spread wide and far to help as many people as possible. More information is available at the
SAMi website.
Charles and Cynthia's story is
here:
