Concept
We created Solis to improve sleep quality, in accordance with the UN goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being. Good sleep quality is essential for well-being, but difficult to attain in our busy modern lives, being surrounded by digital technology that disrupts our circadian rhythms with blue-light. Sleep influences every aspect of our being–mood, lifespan, immune systems, cognitive abilities, and more.
Through initial preliminary research, we identified that light has a significant effect on sleep. For example, blue light is useful to set your circadian rhythm early in the day. However, towards the end of the day, blue light can disrupt your ability to sleep. However, red light has the opposite implications. Knowing this, we wanted to create Solis to aid healthy sleep habits, by curating a nice relaxing bedtime environment and a bright motivating waketime environment. This tool is geared towards busy students and workers who afford to live in a place where there’s zero distraction at night, or bright light and birds in the morning.
Our device will act as a sunrise lamp in the morning, by gradually lighting up to mimic natural dawn. At night time, it can be used as a lamp to emit warm lighting so as to avoid blue-light, and can also be used as a night-light when the user goes to sleep, emitting a faint glow of red-light so as to not disturb the user’s sleep.
Final Video
Goals
In order to test for desirability and usability, we created physical prototypes and a behavioral prototype.
> desirability: Asking users questions about their interaction with Solis, how do users feel about the experience of using Solis and its ability to understand and foster a sleep-centric environment?
> usability: Observing the way users interact with Solis, do users prefer to use voice commands, hand gestures, or buttons? What seem like the most universal patterns of interacting with this device? We can understand if our task flow makes sense to the user, and what are the most intuitive ways to use this device, in order to narrow down on the design in our next prototyping phases
> impact: What effect can you see a device like this leave on your mental and physical health? What are some potentially toxic patterns that could emerge from this? Asking the users such questions after they’ve completed our evaluation, will allow us to account for potential outcomes that we haven’t expected while designing this product.
Implementation
Solis was constructed using a color-changing LED light bulb, a light socket extender cord, a felt handcrafted lampshade, a 3-D printed base, and a speaker. The user is intended to interact with Solis through a behavioral prototype. We created a brochure for our behavioral prototype which details the purpose and functionality of Solis:
Brochure
Overview:
Welcome to Solis – Your Comprehensive Sleeping Aid! Say goodbye to restless nights and tired mornings and hello to rejuvenating sleep with our innovative device designed to enhance your sleep quality and overall well-being.
The purpose of Solis:
Solis features a specialized light bulb that emits both blue and red hues. White light with blue hues helps regulate your circadian rhythm, promoting wakefulness during the day, while white light with warm hues or red light signals the body to prepare for sleep, facilitating a smooth transition into restful slumber. Solis will emit cool lighting during the daytime, warm lighting in the evening, and red light at night. This transition mimics the natural progression of sunlight throughout the day, signaling your body to wind down and prepare for restorative sleep. Additionally, Solis can wake you up in the morning with an alarm.
Importance of Blue and Red Light:
Blue light exposure during the day enhances alertness, cognitive function, and mood. However, excessive exposure to blue light in the evening can disrupt your natural sleep-wake cycle. Red light, on the other hand, promotes relaxation and stimulates the production of melatonin, the hormone responsible for inducing sleep.
Setup:
General Controls:
Switch On and Off: Use voice commands or press the power button on Solis to turn the device on and off effortlessly.
Three different light settings: Use voice commands for different times in the day. To wake you up, the lamp emits blue-hued lighting that gradually turns on and becomes brighter. While you wind down in the evening, the lamp can emit a warm-hued light. Lastly, the lamp can emit a red-hued light as a night light.
Alarm: Use voice controls to set what time you want to wake up. At that time, the lamp will turn on the alarm and sunrise lamp.
Command Walkthrough:
General controls:
Power-on command:
“Hey Solis, turn on”
Power-off command:
“Hey Solis, turn off”
Wakeup:
Wakeup Command: At that time in the morning, the sunrise lamp will activate along with the alarm.
“Hey Solis, set wake-up time to 8 AM”
“Hey Solis, wake me up at 8 AM”
“Hey Solis, schedule alarm for 8 AM”
Turning Off Alarm Command:
“Hey Solis, I am awake now”
“Hey Solis turn off alarm”
Wind-down:
Wind-down Command: Solis will turn on warm-hued lighting
“Hey Solis, set wind-down mode”
“Hey Solis, turn on evening setting”
Night Light Command: Solis will turn on red lighting
“Hey Solis, I’m ready to go to sleep”
“Hey Solis, start bedtime routine”
Evaluation
We conducted a behavioral prototype test in order to evaluate the effectiveness of our prototype. One of the team members acted as the wizard, changing the colors of the lamp based on the participant’s voice commands and also simulated the voice assistant. We gave our brochure to the participant before conducting the test so that they could have a general idea of how to phrase commands to control the lamp. We wanted to evaluate desirability, usability, and impact.
To test the usability of Solis, we observed how our participant interacted with our lamp. She was able to correctly give commands to our lamp but there were a couple mishaps. For example, at the beginning of the test, when she tried to turn on our lamp she looked for a physical button on the lamp instead of using a voice command. However, at the end of testing, she thought that the commands were intuitive which meant that our prototype scored well in usability.
To evaluate desirability and impact, we asked the participant questions about whether or not they see a use for our prototype in their personal lives, how they rated the appearance of the lamp, and so on. She gave generally positive responses, noting that she had actually been on the look-out for a sunrise alarm, and gave us valuable feedback. One piece of feedback she gave to us was to incorporate commands where the user could set a lighting mode at a specific time in day. Another idea was to be able to set the lamp to automatically turn on evening mode at sunset, similar to how iPhones have a setting where warm light mode turns on automatically at sunset.
Analysis
We are satisfied with the product that we created however we feel like we could have performed more user testing. We think the strong point of our final project is the physical design. We are proud of how we combined paper prototyping and 3D printing in a seamless way. Furthermore, we really liked the aesthetics of our final design. The weak point in our final project was the lack of user testing. We only conducted one user test/behavioral prototype and we did not have time to test our final design. If we had more time to complete this project, we would make sure to conduct at least two more behavioral prototypes/usability tests.
