Making sure a baby is still breathing with lasers and a wiimote

[wraggster]

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/baby.jpg[Gjoci] just became a father, and to make up for not having to carry a baby to term he decided to make himself useful in another way. He developed a sensor to detect a baby’s breathing (http://bababreath.blog.hu/), allaying the fears of nervous parents who are wondering why their child is so quiet.Unlike similar builds and products that rely on microphones or capacitive sensors, [Gjoci]‘s build uses the camera from a wiimote to triangulate points of light and detect motion.The build started off with infrared LEDs, but the batteries were big and there is always the possibility of the baby swallowing electrical components. [Gjoci] finally hit upon the idea of using small 1mW laser diodes to project points of light. This worked beautifully, and since newborns don’t move much there’s no danger of shining a laser into a baby’s eye.The rest of the build is just querying the camera every few milliseconds and seeing if the position of the reflections captured by the wiimote camera have changed. In two weeks of operation, [Gjoci] only had to respond to a few false alarms, and the hardware hasn’t crashed at all.After the break are three videos [Gjoci] put up for us that show a test of the breathing detection system, a demo of the alarm, and an example of the build in full operation. A very awesome build, and we look forward to this post being used as evidence of prior art in a patent dispute a few years down the line.
http://hackaday.com/2012/08/21/making-sure-a-baby-is-still-breathing-with-lasers-and-a-wiimote/