The design team at Silent Partner wanted to find a way to help people sleep even when their partner was snoring in bed next to them. Netanel Eyal and Yoni Bazak teamed up with sensor developers, industrial designers, product marketers and launch experts to create Silent Partner, a device that uses Active Noise Cancellation to create a quiet zone around a snoring person's head. The team is nearing the end of a very successful funding campaign on Indiegogo.
Silent Partner is a small device that fits over a user's nose and emits pressure waves designed to cancel out the sound of snoring. Any snorer's spouse will tell you that snoring is a periodic sound, and this helps the device to analyze the waveform and create an inverted waveform to cancel the snoring sounds. A micro USB connector charges the unit and the company also offers a charging station that doubles as a stand for the device.
A sensor, digital signal processor, converters, and a hearing aid battery are all in the two halves of the housing, held together by a flexible cable that allows Silent Partner to fit different face shapes and sizes. Adhesive keeps the device attached to the users face.
Silent Partner applied for a patent in early 2015 so many technical details for the device are proprietary, but Juda Honickman from the team gave me some insight into the design process. The major design requirements were comfort and convenience of the user while still being a wearable device. Using an adhesive from the medical industry allowed Silent Partner to adhere to the face while still being safe. Finding the right combination of speaker and battery was a challenge to produce enough noise cancelling waves but still keep the weight of the unit low. Developing the system to do minimum calculations to process the snoring in real time was another design challenge.
Future iterations of the product might include an alarm that sounds if the user stops breathing. This is a great application of technology that was first patented back in 1936. Units are expected to ship in November 2016.