Smart Companion Pillow – An EPS@ISEP 2019 Project

Abstract

This paper describes the design and development of a Smart Companion Pillow, named bGuard, designed by a multinational and multidisciplinary team enrolled in the European Project Semester (EPS) at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) in the spring of 2019. Nowadays, parents spend most of the day at work and become naturally worried about the well-being of their young children, specially babies. The aim of bGuard is to provide a 24-hour remotely accessible baby monitoring service, contributing to reduce parenting stress. The team, based on the survey of related products, as well as on marketing, sustainability, ethics and deontology analyses, developed a remotely interactive Smart Companion Pillow to monitor the baby’s health and room air quality. The collected data, once it is saved on an Internet of Things (IoT) platform, becomes remotely accessible. The bGuard pillow, thanks to its shape, reduces the risk of the baby rolling from back to tummy, lowering the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).