A pillow that turn tears into a wordless heart-to-heart between loved ones
“At its core, language is simply a vehicle for transmitting thoughts and feelings”
We’ve all had days where all we want to do is bury our heads into a pillow and cry our feelings out. Often, this happens in the solitude of our rooms, away from the prying eyes of others, until the emotion settles down. Tori is a pillow designed to detect tears and transform this raw emotional expression into a signal, alerting an emotional support person who can offer wordless comfort, even from afar.
In Physical Computing, teams were tasked with designing devices that enable two-way communication, translating messages into forms that are meaningful for their recipients. The idea for Tori arose from the team’s reflections on non-verbal ways of expressing difficult emotions such as sorrow, shame, or anxiety—emotions people often struggle to share. This led to the question: How might complex emotions, which are often misunderstood, be translated into sensory messages exchanged wordlessly and confidentially?
The idea of creating a sensor that detects tears intrigued them, so they went about constructing it with conductive tape and an arduino at hand. One side of the tape grid connected to the anode, another to the cathode, and when a teardrop fell in the gaps between the tapes, it completed the circuit due to the conductive properties of salt water. This would then create a red glow on both the pillows, the arduinos communicating wirelessly through bluetooth. The urgent red glow transformed into a soothing warm white light when the recipient patted their pillow, symbolising care and reassurance to the friend on the other side.
A further exploration was using music and sound as a communication medium between the two songbird pillows. Fast, staccato notes in a minor key could convey anxiety, while slow, legato phrases in a lower register could express sorrow. Building the circuits for this interaction deemed to be challenging due to limited audio amplifiers at their disposal so the team pivoted back to LEDs. In the process, they learned how delicate electronics can be, inculcating an appreciation for the craft involved in the making of computational systems.
