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Today I'm going to talk about sleep.
We humans spend almost 30% of life sleeping.
Sleep is important to refresh your body, reorganize your memories,
and insufficient sleep may lead to daytime sleepiness and lack of concentration on your work.
And too much insufficient sleep may leave your immune system weaker,
and you can catch a cold easily.
If you look at the market, there are so many sleep-related goods,
like comfortable pillows, futons, some sleep-inducing music CDs and more recently
there are some high-tech sleep monitors available.
And if you check your smartphone mobile apps,
there are so many sleep-related applications on the smartphone apps market.
And usually these sleep-related apps are given top 10 rankings in health care categories.
Demand for comfortable and better sleep is getting larger and larger.
But by the way, my specialty is not for sleep.
I am a part-time orthopedic surgeon treating bone and joints,
not cosmetic surgery, by the way.
But mostly I dedicate my work for regenerative medicine to try to make organs from cells,
instead of using other peoples' organs for transplantation.
And we're also developing a loading system cooperating with companies for cell cultures,
and also we're developing a kind of 3D bio-printer.
With this printing system, we can fabricate
living 3-dimensional construct from cells.
So our future goal is to make patients' own organs from patients' own cells.
And to expand my research eyes, I really love to explore many gadgets and new technologies,
such as quadcopter or some activity logger and kind of work out. I couldn't finish this program, but already I'm thinking about
whether these technologies can be applied to our research field.
And recently, I was really amazed by Kinect. It's a kind of 3-D scanner
and motion sensor - relatively inexpensive,
and for us it's released as a game controller from Microsoft but recently
thanks to many hackers and Microsoft, many programmers can program their own Kinect program.
So, one day, I invested in Kinect with my kids.
I noticed this Kinect can be used as night vision.
Even in the darkness, the system's still tracking your body parts and captures the night image
without turning the light on.
So I had the idea to use Kinect for a sleep monitor
because most of the smartphone sleep apps
cannot capture your sleeping image, only tell you,
excuse me...
...only replay your sleeping sounds and some graph from motion sensors.
So...
I put my Kinect in my bedroom like this, and made software as a night recorder.
And even covered with a futon, the system still tracks your body,
even if you turn the lights on.
And I also made an analog software. This is replaying my own sleeping image and detecting my body movements.
The yellow line below is showing my body movement one night
and the red line shows my sleeping sounds -
unfiltered sounds.
But seeing this data, I found that I am a heavy snorer.
My wife already told me, but I was never convinced.
And also, I found these small gaps between my sleep cycles.
I was afraid that I stopped breathing while I was asleep - must be sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea syndrome is a kind of abnormal sleeping,
when you stop breathing while you sleep,
mostly brought on by your tongue dropping and obstructing your airway.
So that induces an insufficient oxygen supply to your body.
And usually your sleep partner or bed partner will tell you you are a heavy snorer,
or that you stopped breathing while asleep and ask you to go to the hospital.
But unfortunately, I was kicked out of the bedroom by my wife and I have to sleep alone.
And one of the standard treatments for sleep apnea is this continuous positive airway pressure system (CPAP).
This is good for some certain kinds of sleep apnea,
but if you want this CPAP system in Japan, you have to go to the hospital and put many sensors on your body
and maybe you have to stay one night in the hospital.
But it's troublesome.
So I decided to make a robotic arm
connecting Arduino and Kinect, collaborating with students.
And I put many short lenses on top of the arm, including breath detection sensors and motion sensors.
And when users sleep, the system - including Kinect and short-range sensors - monitors users,
and when sensors detect some events such as too much loud snoring,
or sudden silence,
the arm is activated
then wipes the user's face gently to try to let the user know,
and helping the user to breathe well again.
I think this system is useful for singles like "otaku" with metabolic syndrome
because they have to sleep alone with no one to tell them that they have stopped breathing while they sleep.
Sleep anea may lead the user to daytime sleepiness,
lack of concentration at work, or to fall asleep while in important business meetings.
Or, may induce the user to some serious car accident.
And also there are many reports about sleep apnea may increase risks of hypertension,
brain stroke,
heart failure, and maybe
die young.
So, I think this system may help these guys
and may improve their quality of life and health.
We're still optimizing ideal stimulation methods
not to awake users
but to let users breathe well again
and also prompting users to turn their body position to side sleep
because side sleeping can reduce snoring and sleep apnea.
Gravity may remove the tongue from the blocked airway,
so this is one of the simple solutions for sleep apnea.
This is my youngest boy.
He actually doesn't have sleep apnea by the way.
And you know, as I told you, the CPAP system is one of the best solutions but you have to wear
this fitting mask tightly every night - it's troublesome,
especially for guys who drink too much, like me.
This may often be the case with Japanese businessmen,
but you may have the experience that after drinking too much, you go back home...
you cannot do anything,
just dive into bed.
And the next morning you happen to find
you are on the bed -
just did not change your clothes, still wearing suit, necktie, and turned the TV on - anything.
But this is a very dangerous situation for sleep apnea
because alcohol may increase symptoms of sleep apnea.
But with our system,
you don't have to wear any sensors or device before you sleep.
It automatically detects your movement
and take care of you when you sleep.
Our system also pays attention to users' privacy
in case the user came home with somebody else.
The system always monitors how many people are in front of the system
so the system automatically turns into privacy mode and
just monitors how many people are in front of the camera but never records anything.
It doesn't matter if she is real or not.
But seriously, about 20% of American adults are said to have some sleep apnea,
and in Japan, about 25 million people are said to have sleep apnea.
So our system is relatively cheap and easy to build,
but the benefits from our concept can be tremendous.
And everything, every single element of our system was not invented by ourselves.
You can access almost all the information from the Internet.
You can download the source code of this software and
the blueprint of the hardware.
Thanks to this new era of industrial revolution,
even though I am not from a background of computer science,
electronic circuits,
but if you have passion, you can make it.
So we're thinking about opening this project to anyone,
expecting many Kinect hackers, makers to join this health care program category,
to make our sleep much better and a better world.
Thank you.