A former NAIT student from Red Deer is part of a team nominated for the 2023 Capstone Project of the Year Award for their development of a smart teddy bear to monitor a child’s sleep overnight.
Red Deer resident Nicolette Angara and her teammates Denise Alinsasaguin and Paulina Deng were recognized for their invention of Night Knight with sensors to monitor a child’s sleep, and an app to alert parents of specific problems that impact a child’s quality of sleep.
The award is presented annually by the Association of Science and Engineering Technology Professionals of Alberta (ASET). The project is one of nine finalists and the winner will be announced around the end of October.
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Night Knight houses a circuit board with sensors attached. The teddy bear is Bluetooth-enabled, lightweight, portable, and kid-friendly. It’s intended to sit on a child’s bedside table to alert parents via a smartphone app of potential sleep issues.
Designed to monitor children ages four to 10, it offers advanced features such as movement detection, and humidity and ambient room temperature sensing.
Abnormal movements may indicate that the child is experiencing discomfort and the app will compile movement detection data to assess the child’s average sleeping motion. Maintaining an ideal sleeping environment is also important and the app will sound an alarm to notify the parents when the ambient room temperature exceeds 24 C or dips below 19 C.
According to SleepFoundation.org with information from the American Academy of Pediatrics, sleep challenges affect 25 to 50 per cent of children and impact alertness and attention, cognitive performance, mood, resiliency, vocabulary acquisition, and learning and memory. When a child does not receive the required amount of sleep, trouble with paying attention, mood swings, and behaviour and learning problems will result.
“One of the great benefits of Night Knight is that tired, overworked parents will be able to sleep better at night and with less worry, knowing that their child’s sleep movements and comfort are being monitored,” said team member Alinsasaguin, in a statement.
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ASET CEO Barry Cavanaugh said merging a child’s toy with a practical and useful health-related function holds promise for similar applications in the medical field, especially where the safety and welfare of children are concerned.
The Capstone Project of the Year Award was established by ASET in 2017 in response to overwhelming member interest in stories about Capstone Projects undertaken by teams of engineering technology students from NAIT, SAIT, Red Deer Polytechnic, and Lethbridge College as part of their end-of-program requirements.
ASET represents about 17,000 members, including full-time technology students, recent graduates and fully certified members in 21 disciplines and more than 120 occupations across many industries.
szielinski@reddeeradvocate.com
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