Cuddle Cub: Making the bedtime process a little bit easier
Team update, Global Product Development | By team Bluem: Joseph Akoni, Jeremy Hammer, Angela Lee, Katherine Qiu
According to a study in the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, nearly ten million children in the United States struggle with the bedtime process. Parents are spending around 1.5 hours too many on the bedtime routine and on average are dealing with more than five midnight disturbances per week! That’s a lot of time spent not sleeping, and a lot of potential personal time to be gained.
There are hundreds of products out there specializing in sleep for adults, but very few for children. We believe that we can help fill this gap, with help from today’s growing technological advancements. To that end, we’ve created a smart teddy bear called Cuddle Cub, equipped with sleep tracking and training features to help children soothe themselves back to sleep in the middle of the night — and to provide parents with more free time.
What is Cuddle Cub?
At its core, Cuddle Cub is a companion for your child. It is intended for children ages 2–5 years old. Cuddle Cub incorporates thoroughly researched sleep-tracking technology into fluffy teddy bear. More specifically, it tracks your child’s sleep and converts it to easy-to-read data directly on your mobile device.
The product also allows parents to use this data to customize sleep routines for optimal growth and development. Cuddle Cub also helps your child sleep independently using light and music cues. This ensures a worry-free bedtime experience.
Why should every parent have one?
Numerous studies have shown that cognitive and physical development is tied to sleep. Cuddle Cub helps foster these positive effects by designing optimal sleep cycles for your child and sending gentle signals for a smooth wake-up. Improving the quality of your child’s sleep will make both of your days much more enjoyable. As your child grows up, Cuddle Cub will teach them essential skills such as going to bed on time, which will benefit their transition to school.
Our process: designing for our target group and innovation
This has been an ongoing project for about a year. The Cuddle Cub team enrolled in the Global Product Development course, offered by Berkeley’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, in hopes of becoming closer to bringing our final product to market. During this course, we focused on gathering as much valuable insight from potential users and their families as possible. We initially entered this class with the thought that we would be bringing our prototype to market in the very near future. As part of the course, we performed a few short-term tests with our prototype, in addition to a few long-term ones with our near-final prototype. Through this process, the idea of having a more wearable-like product was brought to our attention, so we explored our options with re-designing the case for our hardware. There are many intricacies with the design for modularity in our product, so we are now working on finding more innovative ways to create this adaptability.
From UC Berkeley to Hong Kong & Shenzhen
Through the class, we were also given the opportunity to go to Hong Kong and China to visit a few hardware manufacturers, accelerators, and startups. It was an amazing experience, as we were able to mingle and exchange ideas with another cohort of talented students based in Hong Kong. One of our favorite parts of the trip was the visit to the PCH Innovation Hub. It was extremely eye-opening: our entire team left with a better understanding of the challenges of manufacturing, but also the myriad ways to design an awesome package for our product. Now that we’re back in Berkeley, we’re excited to apply the knowledge we’ve gained about packaging and manufacturing to our product. Stay tuned for what’s to come!
Follow along with the Bluem team and their Global Product Development classmates as they continue to develop their projects, drawing from expert insights, a field trip to Hong Kong and China, and more along the way. Over the course of the semester, we’re sharing blog posts from each student team here on Medium (read posts from Team JARAD, Team Million Hands, Team Cycle Paths, and Team Back2Bed). You can also learn more about the course here.
