Meet Samuel, Head of Embedded Systems at Dreem

Samuel Beaussier, Head of Embedded Systems.
His unique perspective on Dreem, it’s benefits and your sleep’ future.

In case you haven’t heard — we’re building a headband that’s going to help you sleep better every night. It’s going to use electrodes and a tiny but massively powerful processor to understand your sleep patterns. It also gathers data, and ultimately improve your deep sleep. It’s pretty crazy, and we’re really excited about it -if you couldn’t tell-.

But building this kind of technology takes a seriously talented bunch of people. They work long days to actually turn our vision into something we can hold in our own hands, or wear on our own heads. So we’re taking the time to introduce you to the Dreem team. They help make this happen through their commitment to Dreem, superpower smarts, and just general coolness. Meet one of them, Samuel Beaussier, Head of Embedded Systems. Learn about what he was doing before Dreem and how he spends his days.

Hi Samuel. What is the most exciting thing about working at Dreem?

Working at Dreem offers the possibility to create and develop a very high-technology product that combines many engineering fields. I work alongside smart people in design, mechanics, and electronics all day long. The fact that this technical environment is aimed at revolutionizing people’s everyday life makes this project extremely fulfilling. I get to spend time building technology that will actually impact my friends down the line.

Is there something you do at Dreem that you’d not have been able to do anywhere else? What made you join the team when you did?

Before joining Dreem, I was a research engineer in a high-tech private lab. Dreem reached out and brought me the possibility to work on an ambitious and disruptive consumer product and participate in the full development cycle, from early R&D steps to final customer delivery. That’s a really special opportunity that doesn’t come along very often, and I felt like I had to jump on it.

Beyond the product itself, working on a skillful and innovative team is a strong argument for how unique the company is as well. People are so smart, but they’re not stuck in their ways. They always want to push the envelope, think creatively, and move fast. It’s very much a mentality that I identify with.

Samuel, what are the main challenges you face when embedding software into a wearable device?

The main challenge we’ve faced on the Embedded Systems team is to integrate all the components of the application into the relatively small memory and computation capacities the headband has, while still saving battery energy. From early software architecture to final implementation, all main blocks such as wireless interface (BLE and WiFi), sensors acquisition, and complex sleep algorithms have been designed and optimized to fit into the miniaturized electronic system.

How does what you do on the embedded software team impact the overall headband’s functionality down the line?

The embedded software into the headband is very critical for the user experience. To ensure its robustness, we’ve developed a large number of intensive tests that are run continuously to raise defaults and bugs. As the interfaces of the headband are limited, we needed an infrastructure to monitor the hardware and software metrics once the headbands are shipped. We are now able to remotely detect if the headbands have any issues to provide a high-end quality of service and make sure they’re working for all of our customers.

Thanks, Samuel for this interview!

We also asked Hsin-Yin Chiang, Head of Acquisition, about how she makes sure our electrodes are actually performing. Find out here.