week1b

Introduction

My idea for the final project is to create a device to help people to relax helping them to do “Heart coherence” exercices. The principle is to self control our breathing at a specific rate around 5 breathing per minutes.

Heart Coherence is a physiological state characterized by synchrony between the heart rate variability (HRV) and breathing. It is used as a tool for managing stress and promoting well-being. The principle is to regulate breathing at a certain rate to bring the heart rate into a specific pattern, which has been shown to improve stress management, emotional regulation, and overall health.

During her pregnency my grirlfriend has to do those excercices during 5 minutes several times a day to prevent stress. Now that our daugther is born, sources of stress are differents but still numerous but the habit to makes thoses exercices is difficult to keep. Here is born the idea of a device to help to (at least try) to stay relaxed.

There is several existing tools to do so like this youtube video:

If you are interrested, the goal is to inhale slowly and deeply while the ball is raising, then exhale slowly when it go down. Try to maintain this slow breathing pattern for several minutes when you feel stressed or need to calm down.

There is already some mobile-phone apps to help in those exercices:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martinforget.cardiaccoherencelite&hl=en&gl=US

The object

My idea is to create an object in a pebble form that will help you to breath in rythm and remind you to do your exercices. It can sit on your office desk and flash lights to reminds you to relax regularly will working. It can be bring in you pocket and help you pratice even with closed eyes thanks to embedded vibration motors . You will have to touch the pebble to launch an 5 minutes exercices. An array of rgb leds will display a colored light parttern going from the center to the edges of the device at a low frequency. The effect is not easy to describe with words, I will come back here with a video as soon as I made a quick prototype with neopixel rgb led strip…

Photomontage of the meditation pebble in hands

3D rendering of the pebble with Fusion360

Components

My goal is to have an aestehic “multimaterial” object, with a base milled in wood with CNC, the cover molded in resin and a ring in metal wich can be customized by milling or engraving text (like mantras) or geometrical paterns, flowers etc…

splitted view of the pebble (without battery and pcb)

The top layer is not an lcd but a fixed image, however, one can choose our favorite patern changing the mask before molding resin on it. Or perhaps it can be simply a mask under a transparent resin cover, we will see during prototyping!

Different masks for customisation