Rest Assured
An IoT Ambient Notification System For Human-Dog Remote Interactions
2025
Rest Assured is a small ambient lamp shaped like a sleeping dog curled under a blanket, with only its nose showing. When the dog settles onto its bed at home, a pressure sensor triggers the lamp to glow gently, wherever the owner is. From there, the owner can boop the lamp's nose or rest a hand on it to trigger a diffuser or speaker back home.
We interviewed seven dog owners about their daily routines. Their anxiety showed up in the same places again and again — checking pet cameras out of habit, texting a partner to check on the dog, feeling guilty at random points in the day. The dog was usually fine. The person often wasn't.
Hence, Rest Assured is a human focused, creative technology project that uses subtle, ambient signals to ease the anxiety of leaving a dog home alone.
My part on the team was designing the physical interface — the lamp itself. The base is only a few centimeters tall, so fitting a battery, a microcontroller, a light ring, a switch, and a small servo motor to drive the tail's movement all inside it took several rounds of redesign.
The pressure sensor was its own challenge. Off-the-shelf sensors didn't fit the curved dome or sense a resting hand well, so we built our own out of layered conductive fabric and Eeontex resistive material, wired to an analog pin and tuned over several rounds of testing.
We went through several 3D-printed prototypes and tested different materials — PLA, TPU, resin, and cast silicone — before landing on TPU for the dome.
Rest Assured was published at TEI '26 (the ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction) in Chicago, in March 2026, with Yuqing Liu, Kyunghee Kim, and Hong Yang.
