ThermoPillow
If you’re feeling chilly, ThermoPillow will respond to your hug by raising the room temperature. Need to cool down? Just smooth out the edge and it will understand to lower the temperature to your liking.
By using pressure sensing and variable resistance sensing, I demonstrated how a real world metaphor can be recreated in physical computing for temperature control
PUBLISHED
dec 2024
SERVICES
interaction design & hardware assembly
INDUSTRY
home automation
01
Analysis
We tend to associate comfort, warmth and calm with soft items such as pillows, plush toys and blankets. Using this as a foundational metaphor, I set out to create a pillow that doubles as a medium for regulating the indoor ambient temperature.
02
Ideation
Through probes and ‘pretotyping’ activities, I identified how to expand the pillow as a metaphor for temperature control. Squeezing == Increasing, Stretching == Lowering temperature values. As a quick and dirty prototype, I used a plastic bag with a barometer connected to an ESP32 microcontroller.
To stop accidental activations e.g. when you merely want to rest on the pillow, I added capacitive touch tape to create a secondary trigger. For stretch sensing I used Adafruit Conductive Elastic.
03
Sketch and Prototyping
I gathered all components and then assembled an inflatable heat sealed TPU pocket with a barometer, vibration module and stretch sensor. The air pocket was placed inside a pillow to maintain the natural soft surface of the pillow.
04
Finish
The pillow was then evaluated by 25 users in a lab setting to assess the different modules of UX using the meCUE Questionnaire. Pain points were isolated and the second iteration is in progress
