What the world needs is a little nap

This article first appeared in BTS Issue 2.

By Tan Mae-Sy, Sophomore
Engineering Systems and Design

If there was anything that attracted me to this project, it is the word “Sleep” – not only do I indulge in it (almost like a passion), I also feel that sleep is something that our busy society sometimes underappreciates. As the project name suggests, our project requires us to design a lighting product or system that uses modern technology that allows users to enjoy better quality sleep.

To add to the excitement of this project, we also had a key stakeholder in this project, which is Klites, a LED company in China. This essentially means that we needed to design a product that not only functions but also is marketable. The need for the design to be marketable was the first obstacle that our group encountered during the ideation process as the market for sleep assistive lights is already highly saturated. Through weeks of ideation and looking at our project from different angles, we finally found an opening which is for us to target naps rather than long periods of sleep which many companies’ products focused on.

With that out of the way, we also had to put our prototyping skills to the test – namely CADDING components and the exterior of our table lamp as well as coding for an eyelid tracking camera using OpenCV and Dlib. With our product heavily reliant on how well the software and hardware work together, my group found ourselves troubleshooting from start to end – even right before our product launch.

One week before we had our product launch, we also made a visit to Klites where we presented our product in Chinese!

Looking back at my entire ALP journey, I have learned so much more than I expected myself to – both hard skills and soft skills. This is one project that I really enjoyed working on. I am really lucky to have experienced something like that during ALP.

Read more about Mae-Sy’s summer adventure at the Asian Leadership Programme here.