Networked Bed Presence sensor

John Schimmel and I had a meeting with a friend the other day who has chronic condition, and is looking for tools to notify her family and friends of her activity at home, so she can live more independently. A lot of good ideas came up, making for a potentially exciting project that’d be useful someone we care about: a win-win situation.

One of the ideas she had was a bed sensor, which would let her family know whether she’s in bed or not, so they can call to either wake her up, or tell her to get some rest if she’s up too late. Inspired by Mustafa Bagdatli and Diego Rioja’s BedData project, and assisted by them, we thought we’d see if we could put something together quickly, connecting force sensing resistors to an Arduino and using an Ethernet shield to upload data to Pachube.  The project has not been tested in the field yet, but it’s working in the lab, and was simple to set up.  It may be a useful example for other sensor projects.

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