There’s A Smart Pillow And It Scares The Shit Out Of Me

To kick off the first day of Computex, Intel held a “Meet the Makers” event showing off some prototypes and proof of concepts showing some of the ways their chips are being used in devices that could one day improve society.

At this event, there was a pillow. And it scares the shit out of me.

It’s called Dillow, and it’s a smart pillow created by four students. The basic idea is pretty simple: using an Intel Edison tiny board computer, the pillow can track and monitor your sleeping habits. That data can then be uploaded to the cloud, where you can sit down and get berated by your doctor for attempting to overdose on caffeine on a near-daily basis.

So far, so good. It’s just a clever pillow. Not sure it’d be clever enough to survive getting tossed around the room, but then consumers probably don’t purchase manchester for its versatility in domestic warfare.

The concerning is how the students incorporated IBM’s speech to text recognition software, so the pillow can record the nightmarish language your brain farts out at night for posterity.

And the frightening part of that? Dillow saves the crap you mutter aloud and can post it anonymously to Facebook, so the world can get a kick out of it.

One of the students told me the inspiration came from the laughs about what they muttered to each other in their sleep. And I can understand why: I’ve been told before that I talk in my sleep, and I sure as damn hell didn’t believe what I was told in the morning.

And I’m more than happy to leave it there. I don’t want to find out how warped my dreams really are. I certainly don’t want them saved for posterity. And the prospect of an automated, Facebook wall filled with my unconscious ramblings is genuinely terrifying.

But there could be some potential for Dillow to bring some good into my life. Not too long ago, my partner told me about an interaction with my unconscious self that seems like the kind of moment you’d want to remember.

My partner: “Hey, can I have the blankets back?
Me: “… no”


The author travelled to Computex 2016 as a guest of Intel.


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