You're reading: Ukraine to present smart pillow at Falling Walls Lab conference of inventions in Berlin

The PI smart pillow beat back stiff competition from an exoskeleton, a virtual Chernobyl tour, an electronic wallet, a magic diet pill and many other inventions to win the right to represent Ukraine at the Falling Walls Lab in Berlin this November.


Some 30 young
scientists presented their inventions to the jury at the first Falling Walls
Lab qualifying competition in Kyiv on Sept.17. The competition was held at the
Institute of Internal Relations of the Taras Shevchenko National University of
Kyiv.

According to
competition rules, each participant had only three minutes to present their
invention to the jury, and it was Oleksandr Shymanko, a student of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National
University
, whose smart pillow won the top prize from the judges. Shymanko
won a MacBook Air and a ticket to Berlin to present his invention at the
completion finals.

“Everybody likes
sleeping. And I have an idea for a smart gadget that would be useful for all
sorts of people, but especially for those who have health problems. The smart
pillow allows you to track your sleep, wake up naturally, and listen to music,”
Shymanko said during his presentation.

The PI is a
high-tech pillow with special software that connects it to your smart phone. It
records your head shape, checks your pulse during sleep, and even will wake you
up at the ideal time with music.


“It can play songs
to get you off to sleep, and even will choose your favorite music, forming a
playlist from the songs in your smart phone. It’s also ideal gadget for kids,
because it can tell them a bedtime story,” Shymanko told the Kyiv Post.

The pillow is
charged via a wireless charger. Shymanko said the PI version for kids has its
own special design.

The young inventor
will present the first prototype of the PI during the Falling Walls Lab in
Berlin on Nov. 9 – Ukraine will be taking part in this international conference
of inventions for the first time.

The Falling Walls
Conference is an annual global gathering of forward thinking individuals from
75 countries organized by the Falling Walls Foundation, which was set up in
2009 on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each
year, 20 of the world’s leading scientists are invited to Berlin to present
breakthrough research. The aim of the conference is to connect science with
innovative industry, politics, the media, and the arts, identifying trends,
opportunities and solutions connected to global challenges, and making research
understandable to a broad audience.

Kyiv Post writer Veronika Melkozerova can be reached
at [email protected]

The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum ,FISON and SoftServe.