Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 02, 2018 - June 05, 2018
This study aims to develop a bedding system to automatically provide a comfortable body support condition. To realize the performance, it needs to estimate user's sleep posture and to induce the comfortable posture by controlling the bedding. As the first step, this paper describes a fluid-driven pillow composed of multiple flexible actuators and contact pressure sensors. To examine the comfortable posture of each user in sleep, we developed a system to search the posture with a tablet device. Using the device, the user can find his own comfortable pillow shape and the contact state. This paper also demonstrates a control performance that induces a comfortable condition when the head moved to left or right in sleep. For the control value, the center of contact state of the pillow was used. The experiments with three subjects successfully showed that difference from the target value was within about 10 mm.
