It has been a great month at Nora HQ. As always, we love sharing our journey of building a truly simple, anti-snoring device with our customers and Kickstarter backer community .

If you are familiar with the product development process, you know that bridging the gap between the functional prototype and the manufacturable product is where many critical decisions are made. We are proud to say we have been able to address these technical complexities, while keeping the core features of Nora intact and staying true to our vision for an elegant and effective device, one that snorers and their bed partner will actually want to use in their bedrooms.

Lots of expert advice from veteran Electronic Engineers, Industrial Designers, and Mechanical Engineers has been implemented during the DFM (Design for Manufacturing) phase. It’s time to get geeky again. Here is a glimpse into some of the main considerations:
Enhanced snore detection to stop the snoring before your partner wakes up.

During the DFM phase we dedicated extra efforts to fine-tune our electronics architecture with special attention to battery life. To keep Nora’s bedsider wireless and meet the battery life requirements, we evaluated a myriad of architectures and division of duties between the bedsider, the housing inside the soft case, and the app. We have come up with a few clever tricks to reduce battery consumption along the way. Adding that to our patents!

It’s fair to say this portion of the work has taken slightly longer than we originally planned. But it is really satisfying to know that as a result we have enhanced Nora’s snore detection, which makes it far more accurate in monitoring and stopping snoring.

DESIGN IMPROVEMENTS

The overall shape of the bedsider is rounded a bit more to feel softer to the touch. We cannot wait for you to hold one in your hand. On the bottom of the bedside we have updated the sensitivity adjustment to a combination of push buttons and LEDs instead of a physical slider.

After evaluating our microphone options, and exploring internal architecture of the bedsider, the design has been updated with a dedicated microphone pinhole in the front. This gives a nice directional look to the design and allows for cleaner audio signal. This might seem like a small adjustment but it means Nora can hear and respond better.