(L-R) Denise Alinsasaguin, Red Deer resident Nicolette Angara, and Pauline Deng, former NAIT team of biomedical engineering technology students who created the Night Knight invention. (Supplied)

By Alessia Proietti

'Night Knight'

Teddy bear monitor device for sleeping kids earns provincial honour for Red Deer woman and former student team

Oct 22, 2023 | 7:35 AM

Is there a warm, fuzzy approach to ensuring a sleeping child’s well-being? One Red Deer resident and her all-women former team of NAIT biomedical engineering technology students has identified it by transforming a teddy bear into a special device that has now received a provincial honor.

The invention called ‘Night Knight’ can monitor a sleeping child and inform the parents of specific problems that could impact quality of sleep. Former NAIT teammates Nicolette Angara, a resident of Red Deer, Denise Alinsasaguin and Paulina Deng have been nominated for the prestigious 2023 Capstone Project of the Year Award, which is given out annually by the Association of Science and Engineering Technology Professionals of Alberta (ASET).

The team state that sleep is an essential building block for a child’s mental and physical health. According to the Sleep Foundation 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.

Effectively a smart teddy bear, Night Knight houses a circuit board and has sensors attached. It is Bluetooth®-enabled, lightweight, portable, kid-friendly, and is 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.

Project with components. (Supplied)

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“The merging of 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,” said ASET Chief Executive Officer Barry Cavanaugh.

Motion sensors on Night Knight detect sleeping movements. For example, the team says abnormal movements may indicate that a child is experiencing discomfort. The app will compile movement detection data to assess the child’s average sleeping motion.

They add that maintaining an ideal sleeping environment is also important. When the ambient room temperature exceeds 24C or dips below 19C, the Night Knight app will sound an alarm to notify the parents.

Graphical display. (Supplied)

“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 Alinsasaguin.

The former NAIT team’s project is one of nine finalists for the 2023 ASET Capstone Project of the Year Award. The winning project will be announced at the end of this month.

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.