Stop snoring with Raspberry Pi
How many of you have woken up grumpy from being snored at all night? Or maybe you’re the snorer whose sleep is interrupted by being elbowed in the ribs to get you to stop. Not only does snoring keep your partner awake, it also affects the quality of your own sleep, even though you might not realise it.
Bryan and Brayden Staley think they’ve come up with a solution: a wearable hearing support device and a Raspberry Pi work together to send the wearer a haptic signal when they start snoring, which soothes them and disrupts the cycle.
Wristwear stops you snoring
The wearable device that this project hinges on is the Neosensory Buzz. Worn on the wrist, it helps people with hearing difficulties pick up on things like doorbells, alarms, and even their name being called.
Working alongside the Buzz bracelet is a sound inference base, which consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and a Seeed ReSpeaker. The sound inference base picks up and classifies audio, and specifically recognises snoring. Once it detects a certain number of snoring events, it sends a sinusoidal signal to the Buzz bracelet, and continues until audio level falls below the snoring threshold.
Hardware
GitHub repos
- ss-app (provides the utilities used to build up a Raspberry Pi from scratch to perform audio classification)
- neosensory-python-sdk (a Python package for interacting with neosensory products)
- YAMNet (a pretrained deep net that predicts audio event classes)
Does it actually stop snoring?
Snoring was down by 56% on the nights this project was tested, even though it’s still in the development stage. We like those figures!
Special shout out to developer Brayden, who is just 13 years old. This is his second auditory project, according to his Hackster profile.
25 comments
Kayley
Love the concept, although the $800 price of the Neosensory would need to come down significantly for this to be viable. I assume the high price is down to the high R&D overheads something like this has but sadly makes it an unrealistic product for 99% of people.
Bryan Staley
We agree the Buzz price tag is too high for DiY attempts at this project. We’re looking into prototyping a haptic feedback device that uses common off-the-shelf parts. There are some good suggestions in this blog that we’ll be taking a closer look at.
Yash Singh
Love the concept,the $800 price of the Neosensory makes it an unrealistic product for 99.99% of people. Well I have an idea for your next blog, You can give a shout out to some small Raspberry Pi Creators, like Tejas Singh YT, Raspberry Pi projects and more, The Techie Scientist etc.
Rob
Hold up – this actually shows a lot of promise. Forget the price tag – it’s a prototype built stop an existing application – but as a concept, recognizing and classifying the sound of snoring and then sending a haptic mechanism to stop it feels sound.
One question though: would it pick up on a second snorer? I don’t want to be falsely accused!
fanoush
it could correlate sound with accelerometer data from the bracelet, maybe if you are snoring your body vibrates a bit
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
Agreed Rob. It’s a costly first try but, it’s a prototype! So they’ve utilised what was available in the market. All sorts of potential here 👍
Bryan Staley
Excellent insight Rob. We actually addressed false positives in our demonstration to the hackster.io judge panel. The default YAMNET model is general purpose and will detect snoring from a non-wearer. Our follow-on solution with include some for of either transfer learning or k-means separation to help weed out false positives.
Jeff Bouchard
I stutter and once bought an Easyspeech device for 5000$ it was working very well until I lost it, it was a solo hear device.
Saying that I find the concept most interesting would be an understatement. I’m quite versed in Raspberry pis, android OTTs and Pine64 clusters, received a Vim3 with NPM just this week and I have a rising crypto project on blockchain (2 actually) if partnerships are on anyone’s table you know where to find me. I’ll hit the repos now.
Holger
I like the concept, especially if it could discriminate between me and my wive snoring and take a record with timestamps and snoring pattern, loudness and so on.
Wouldn’t it be possible to use a cheap(er) Android smart watch for haptic feedback?
Stuart Andrew Jones
Documenting excessive snoring could be important, as this is a sign of developing obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that is potentially deadly. Using a microphone equipped Raspberry Pi and performing analysis on the audio could also detect snoring, if trained to recognize the typical snoring pattern of the target sleeper. A buzzer applied to the sleeper could then provide feedback.
thagrol
Unfortunately not everyone who snores has sleep apnoea and not everyone who has sleep apnoea snores.
I was told by the medical staff treating me that the usual diagnotic method is to measure blood oxygen saturation over one or more nights.
Or monitoring the logs of your CPAP machine but you need to have been diagnosed before you can get one of thsoe…
Andrew
I’m thinking that you could make your own wristband using an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect Board (when they come out) with the Pimoroni Haptic Breakout.
Michael
It would be interesting to find out whether disturbing someone’s sleep all the time to stop them from snoring actually improves sleep quality. It may actually make things worse for them (but better for their bedfellows).
Neil
It would certainly not improve sleep quality. I used to suffer from sleep apnoea, where lack of oxygen makes you wake many times through the night. As a result, you are always tired, no matter how long you stay in bed.
Richard Dobb
You are right sleep apa is a true killer in the bedroom
david
an alternative would be to adapt a haptics-device eval board from TI or one of the semiconductor companies.
Pierre
Why not use the LilyGo T-WATCH-2020 for haptic feedback? It is a watch with a programmable ESP-32, touch display and built-in vibration motor. Best of all: it is affordable, about 20 times as cheap as the Neosensory.
Brayden
Great suggestion, we are trying to make it more affordable and really take it to the next step. Comments like this are really helpful thanks!
Bryan Staley
Thank you! This is a great, and has all the bells an whistles. Appreciate the suggestion.
Felix
Interesting concept! Although snoring sensors are already a thing (see website url ). But I like the hacking approach, developing other ways to find a solution to a problem helps advancing.
Best regards!
Chris P
It is really a good solution for those who often snore while sleeping. however I think the price of $800 for a product is quite expensive. I hope manufacturers will find ways to reduce the cost of their products.
Bryan
Does anyone on this forum have any experience with kickstarter and the process of starting a Kickstarter project?
D.
Neat. Not priced for DIY. Think I’ll wait for the retail product, delivered by Apple ;)
wasyl00
I do the same thing with my $20 Mi Band plus $10 D1 mini with sound sensor powered by Nodered on my local instance of HomeAssistant.
w
why not just use a noise canceler
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