A physical alarm designed to get you out of bed, every time.
womp
womp is a silent, haptic alarm. It uses tiered vibrations, motion detection, and gently behavioral nudges to get you out of bed without sound, snoozing, or slipping back into sleep.
Project Duration
Ongoing
Industry
Consumer hardware
Sleep tech
Health & Wellness
Team
Tools
Skye Gaertner (Co-founder)
Figma
Protopie
Notion
Tongfei Zhu (Developer)
Eshaan Kothari (3D Designer)
PROBLEM
As college students, it’s hard to wake up when you say you will
It’s not that we don’t want to wake up; it’s that nothing is designed to help us follow through.
IDEATION
Designing a system people can’t ignore
To design something reliable, we first had to understand why everything else breaks.
Our guiding question: How do we ensure a user is physically out of bed?
Exploring failure points
We tested phone-based alarms, wearables, and external triggers.
Anything removable, tappable, or close to the pillow wasn’t enough. If a user can silence it half-asleep, it’s already over.
Converging on the right medium
Early prototypes ranged from mats to pressure sensors to wrist worn haptics. Each had a trade off: too easy to cheat, uncomfortable, or inconsistent.
Once we moved to mattress-level haptics, everything clicked. It let us use strong vibrations without noise, and it created a wake-up moment that wasn’t tied to screens or willpower.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Turning insights into hardware
Our guiding principles: comfort, friction-less, and durability
Refining the form factor
A sending band that wraps the mattress
It uses pressure sensors to detect is someone is still lying down. If there’s weight on the bed, the system knows the user hasn’t gotten up.
A detachable screen that docks
A small screen snaps into place to set your alarm time. Dock it, and the time is set. After that, it stays silent until 5 minutes before the alarm time.
The wake-up experience
PROOF-OF-CONCEPT
Building the MVP, in public
Our goal is to gather fast feedback, build with an audience, and hold ourselves accountable.
Reach out if you want to see earlier explorations, more of the thinking involved, or our future plans for womp.
ADDITIONAL EXPLORATIONS
Plenty more lives in the archive
2025 @ Maya Parthasarathy
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