In High School, Yue Fan came up with the idea of the pattern clock to cure his own chronic oversleeping problem. He discovered that he was waking up and turning off his alarm clock...
The idea of the pattern clock is that you have to be awake enough to repeat back a pattern it displays to you, thereby ensuring (hopefully) that you will not fall back asleep.
Fast forward four years, and Yue is a junior at University of Michigan's College of Engineering. He has developed fully working prototypes and has 1000 pre-orders with a potential price of $40. In order to contract the clock out for manufacture at $13/unit, he will need 5000 orders. Finally, he is considering the tradeoffs between selling direct and using retail channels.
Much of this development occurred with the aid of University of Michigan's More Program, a program we hope to cover more in depth in the future.