My daughter has a problem...

Don't get me wrong, she's a smart, happy, relatively obedient kid with many friends and interests.  But she has a tendency to zone out.  When she zones out, she has no perception of the passage of time.  She goes into a state where she exists outside of time.  Well, maybe I exaggerate, but it sure feels that way to a couple of impatient parents.

This trance-like state is especially likely to strike while she's in the bathroom ready to take a shower.  It's become a tradition to send her upstairs for a shower and then waiting an agonizing 30 minutes while not a single sound emerges from the bathroom.  Then a concussive shout from one of her parents kicks the gears back into motion and it triggers an immediate flush and the sound of the shower being turned on.

The shower of course is another opportunity for her to continue her meditation which then results in more shouting and gnashing of teeth.  After many threats and attempts at rewards or punishment, we have come to the conclusion that she does not have any form of control over these episodes.

What is a parent to do?

During one of these incidents a spark of inspiration struck me.  We needed a way to snap her out of these trances without using one of her angry parental units.  A machine would be able to do this without getting angry.  She needed a sort of pacemaker for her brain to get her functioning again.  After discarding the idea of actual wires connected to her brain and zapping her back into action, I came up with an alternate solution.

Assuming she was awake during these episodes, I could use the bathroom lights to snap her back into reality.  I would use an arduino to control her bathroom lights.  It would work as follows.  When she turns on the bathroom lights she gets 15 minutes of uninterrupted illumination.  After 15 minutes the lights start to blink off for a couple of seconds every minute.  After 20 minutes, the lights start to blink off for 5 seconds every minute.  After 25 minutes the lights go off and don't come back on.

The actual implementation is not foolproof but fills its intended purpose.  Basically, the whole contraption is powered on when a standard light switch is turned on and starts the sequence described previously.  Turning the light switch off and on again will of course restart the timer at zero but this is not a problem in practice, since the intended purpose of the device is to bring a child back into reality and not to enforce an intricately timed light show.

It's been 6 months since this was implemented.  You may wonder, what has been the result of the experiment?  Well, we never have to shout anymore.  Shower time is usually under half an hour and there have been some unexpected benefits!  We have substantially diminished our daughters fear of the dark and she has begun to develop some rudimentary echolocation abilities.

I'll include build details in another post.