Picture – The New York Times
During the last decade, the market has been flooding with usual things that suddenly became Smart by using certain technologies, and are supposed to make your life easier. The most recent trend is developing smart products focused on your sleep, but there are still many sceptical questions about how efficient it is. Here are some of them:
Wearables – for instance, 2breathe bracelet for shy $180 that is tracking your breathing and playing you some lullabies with automatically turning-off, once it senses that you are off too. You get the full report from your sleep via its mobile application in the morning.
Smart beds – The Sleep Number 360 is sensing your moves and shifts and adjusting the mattresses temperature and positioning through the night. The bed can also adjust the mattress for 2 people independently, and they say the mattress can even sense when one partner is snoring and gently raise his side of the bed to make him quiet. The other mattress by Kryo is filled with water and allows you to regulate your temperature during sleep (estimated to improve deep sleep by just 20% though).
Smart pillows – Zeeq pillows can track your breathing, moves and play you music, and Sleepace is developing a small device that is sticking to your pillow and tracks your sleep cycles and wake-ups.
While all of these is impressive, experts say that currently, the technology is certainly ahead of the clinical world itself – tech companies created so many ways to keep track on all your body signals and movements, but the questions they raise are still left unanswered by clinicians. What are users supposed to do with all this data? Is it supposed to make them pay more attention to their sleep and rest longer? Doubtable.
Few suggestions brought up by Michael Breus, a psychologist who specializes in sleep disorders, is so the data that all those products generate is containing more personalized suggestions, e.g. advises on the best time to go to sleep, or take a nap, or wake up, or compare your data with other users and deliver feedback based on that. Tracking your sleep has to eventually become useful knowledge and be addressed. Until then, the benefit of all the smart products in sleep tech are limited and so far more entertaining than useful.
– Based on Mashable article
For me this specific type of invention is interesting, but I fully agree that this data, obtained after using this staff are rather not so useful like our breath analysis during for example training time, but of course maybe there are some group of people, who are interested in monitoring their sleeping behaviors, cause of many individual reasons. Btw this alarm- pillow is a nice idea, much better than typical phone sounds.
When we hit the appstore or playstore. The first thing we look at free apps on the market. I always wonder, why someone should create an app buy or rent a server for it. Develop to give it for free.. Never ever happened at least to me :). It is true that most of the apps or websites collect your information to sell it or use it for their purpose.
Rather than creating survays and trying to engage people to fill it. It is a good idea to create an app and give it for free to collect a lot of data than you can imagine.