Pillow Talk: Feel the presence of your loved one: Feel your loved one next to you, even when you’re far away. Stay connected by sharing each other’s heartbeats

 Updates:
– We’ve hit over 30% of our goal! Thank you!
– We’ve introduced a new reward, enabling you to pledge a Pillow Talk to a separated family, eg. one with a member serving in the military

It’s what you’ve been waiting for! Quite simply, Pillow Talk enables two people to experience each other’s presence. It sends the sound of your realtime heartbeat to a speaker under your partner’s pillow. By sharing something so intimate with each other, you can feel connected in a unique and special way.

With Pillow Talk, you can lie in bed next to your loved one, even when they are on the other side of the world.

Each person has a wristband they wear to bed at night and a small speaker to place under their pillow. The wristband picks up your real-time heartbeat and sends it to the other person. The result is an intimate and engaging interaction between two people, regardless of the distance between them.

You are paired with your loved one through a smartphone app that runs in the background. 

 

Digital technology lets us email, text message, poke and video call people. That’s great – but it’s nothing like being in the same room, enjoying your partner’s company.

There is something special about coming home from a long day and being with your partner. Spending time with people we love feels special even if one of us is reading a book whilst the other is watching television.

Until now technology hasn’t been designed help us recreate these special moments. Now you no longer have to message your loved one; you can be there with them.

 

Pillow Talk was originally a project for couples in long-distance relationships. However, it has proven unexpectedly popular with other family relationships and people from all careers, living situations and walks of life.

Pillow Talk is for anyone who wants to feel connected to a loved one in a playful and engaging way.

Pillow Talk is the first product that lets you feel your loved one’s presence.

The sound of a heartbeat is uniquely personal and intimate, even more so when experienced through a soft pillow. By placing your hand on the speaker, the “feeling” of the heartbeat is akin to laying your hand on your loved one’s chest.

Check out reactions at Wearable World Congress in San Francisco earlier this year:

Other benefits include: 

• Better sleep. The sound of a steady heartbeat is the most soothing noise to the human subconscious. As babies in the womb, all we hear for the first 9 months of our existence is our mother’s heartbeat. It’s the first and only sound we come into the world knowing. 
• An ongoing sense of connection. Don’t spend hours on Skype every night; you can begin to wind down for the evening, read a book, have a nightcap, all whilst being connected to your loved one.
• A feeling of security. Know when your loved one is in bed. Know they are safe and well.

We designed the product to be a new kind of wearable. It’s a communication product, not a fitness or sleep tracker. We don’t need to monitor your sleep because we know you’ll sleep sounder with Pillow Talk.

The fabric is soft and comfortable for use in bed and the heart rate sensor pops out to allow easy charging of the module and washing of the wristband.

The speaker can be used without the soft top for a deeper, louder sound, or with it, for use inside pillowcases, or just to cradle in your hands. 

Currently available in two colours; Heart Red and Beat Blue. At the moment we’re working within a limited colour catalogue of the fabric supplier; if we surpass out target, other options will be available.

Our team studied every aspect of the product to create the optimal design. We’ve had our friends and family sleep with an assortment of speaker shapes and sizes, worn PCBs taped to our wrists 24 hours a day to monitor battery lives, and stroked every piece of fabric we came across!

Wristband:
Bluetooth Smart 4.0, rechargeable. Sophisticated signal processing to give reliable heart rate detection. Supports over-the air-updates via the app.

Speaker:
0.5W, 8ohm, louder than it sounds

Our app (available on iOS and Android) is how your device communicates with your partner. It doesn’t play a large part in your Pillow Talk experience; it just enables us to connect you with your partner, no matter where you are in the world.

Pillow Talk makes it easy to stay connected with your loved ones. The set-up is easy, just use the mobile app to connect your and your partner’s smartphones. Then pair your wristbands to your smartphones.

At night when you are ready to go to bed, put on the wristband and place the small speaker under your pillow. The wristband will pick up your real-time heartbeats and send it to the speaker under your partner’s pillow, and vice versa.

The shared experience is intimate and comforting. It’s a new way to interact with your loved one, and to feel each other’s presence when you are far away.

Pillow Talk started as a university project of Little Riot’s founder, Joanna. She studied interaction design at university and, partly due to her own long-distance relationship, was exploring how people used technology to communicate.

She made a short video to explain her concept to her university lecturers, which quickly went viral on the internet. By the time she graduated a month later, she was receiving several hundred emails a day from people asking if Pillow Talk was available to buy. 

For 4 years, Joanna has been making prototypes, breaking prototypes, building a team and slowly but surely bringing Pillow Talk to life. She’s pitched the idea to anyone who would listen and showed the product to couples all around the world. 

Pillow Talk has been a labour of love for many years. If you’ve been following us on Facebook, you’ll know how relentlessly we’ve worked to bring this to life! 

After so much support from all over the world and such a community-driven product development, it only seems fitting that we turn to Kickstarter to see us through the final stage of this journey.

We’re raising £75,000  (about $100,000) to support the manufacturing process and enable us to make and ship the very first batch of Pillow Talks.

We hope you want to pre-order a Pillow Talk, but if you don’t (or you’re not in a relationship!) then we have a reward for every pocket. No matter what you pledge, your support is helping a 4-year dream come true, and will see thousands of people around the world to feel connected to someone they love.

 Buying one as a gift?

If you’re purchasing a Pillow Talk set for someone as a gift for Christmas, let us know when the campaign ends and we’ll make sure they receive a little something in the post to let them know one has been bought for them! 

Whilst it’s taken us four years to get here, the silver lining is that we’ve already made most of the mistakes that often trip people up.

Shipping:
We don’t want to be one of those projects that doesn’t ship on time, so we’ve given you a very conservative shipping date. It’s possible we’ll manage to get your Pillow Talks to you sooner. 

International backers: We want to make Pillow Talk available worldwide, but there are a couple of logistical issues that mean we cannot ship to every country. Sadly we are currently unable to ship to: Argentina, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar/Burma, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Please note: Backers may need to pay for customs and duty.

Our team includes 4 nationalities and spans an age range of 23 to 58. We collectively harness backgrounds that include everything from startups and design research to aircraft engineering and chocolate-making machines. 

We’re also currently part of the Wayra accelerator program, funded by Telefonica. Our advisors include the CEO of Kano and a VP at Jawbone. 

Visit us!
We’re based in Central London. If you’re in the area, you are more than welcome to come round for a cup of tea and a play with the prototypes, just let us know. 

We’re excited at the prospect of reaching our target so that we can begin delivering Pillow Talk to the world, but we’ve also had some thoughts about what we’ll do if we move beyond our funding goal. Surpassing our target will enable us to add extra features to the product:

Pillow Talk wouldn’t be where it is today without the support of you all. If you’ve been following Pillow Talk in the run up to our Kickstarter launch, thank you so much, we hope it was worth the wait! If you’re learning about Pillow Talk for the first time today, then thank you for checking our our campaign and we hope to have you join us. 

If Pillow Talk makes your heart grow fonder, please help us out by sharing our campaign on social media, or by sending it to someone you know who might love it!

Source: ICNW