SleepyFlora: Supporting Sleep Sharing and Augmentation over a Distance for Social Bonding across Time Zones

Sleep plays a significant role in our health and well-being. We can see an increasing amount of work in HCI exploring the design for better sleep. However, most of these works only focus on sleep tracking and reminding. The social perspective of sleep is rarely explored. We believe that sleep is tightly associated with social connection and intimacy. This work explores how sleep sharing can facilitate social bonding over a distance. We present SleepyFlora, an interactive system that enables a user to know the other user’s real-time sleep stages via a flower-shaped installation and augment their sleep by sending soothing aromas and playing music remotely. With SleepyFlora, we hope to further the understanding of interaction design around sleep by considering its social perspective. Moreover, we hope our work can provide a novel approach, i.e, enabling sleep sharing, for facilitating social bonding over a distance.