Design and Construction of a Portable Electronic Sleep Inducer for Low Resource Settings

Abstract

Good quality restful sleep is indispensable to mental and physical health. However, pressure due to busy life style, work and sometimes physiological factors have placed constraints on adequate and healthy sleep pattern leading to several sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome. Sleep disorder affects the quality of life of such patients as it grossly reduces efficiency at work and leads to poor mental and physical health. Available drugs to treat this disorder are addictive with strong adverse effects, while existing devices to provide intervention are very expensive. Hence, the development of an affordable, portable electronic sleep inducer with display unit is presented. It uses geomagnetic property of the earth coupled with electromagnetic wave induction to stimulate sleep. The signal frequency was generated by IC4047 coupled with Arduino Uno and ATmega 328p for device control. The output of this electronic sleep inducer is found to satisfactorily produce 5.89 Hz and 3.58 Hz for theta and delta waves respectively, needed to induce sleep. It consumes less power and it is rechargeable. Keywords— Sleep; Sleep disorder; Insomnia; Geomagnetic wave;

Posture monitoring device for abnormal spine musculoskeletal detection using flex sensor

“…The flex sensor is then connected to the Arduino Uno board which houses the 328p microcontroller [19]. The microcontroller interprets the flex sensor signal (i.e., which converts the bending angle into electrical resistance changes), and feeds the alarm with the appropriate response.…”