Sense sleep tracker monitors bedroom environment

Have you ever tracked your sleep patterns? How do you track your sleep?

In general, people usually wear a sleep monitor wristband to track their daily movements and sleep cycles. There are lots of sleep-tracking gadgets in market. Sleep trackers aren’t new. One common problem they have is that they all require users to wear technology to bed.

A new prototype can solve this problem. It tracks both your sleep patterns and the environment around you. More importantly, you don’t have to wear anything while you are asleep!

A small cute sensor-filled ball called the Sense is now gaining lots of eyeballs on Kickstarter. The idea behind Sense is that not only your body system but also your room’s conditions can affect the quality of sleep.

The Sense device comes with two parts – a sensor-filled ball and a “sleep pill”. The primary monitor is a polycarbonate orb that sits on a nightstand. The orb measures your bedroom’s conditions – light, temperature, sound, humidity, light and even the dust in the air. It tells you the conditions of your room by its changing color. When conditions are just right, the orb turns green for a few seconds to indicate that the environment is good for you to sleep.

The secondary monitor is a tiny circular “Sleep Pill” sensor that clips onto your pillowcases. The Pill has an accelerometer and gyroscope. Like most sleep trackers, the Pill records your sleep patterns by tracking your movement during your sleep. The two gadgets report back to your iOS or Android device through the Sense app over Bluetooth.

In addiction, the Sense has a speaker that can play sounds so it can be used as an alarm. But it is different than those normal alarms that always wake you up at your requested time. The Sense will only wake you up once you’ve finished a REM cycle. Hopefully the alarm will only wake you up early and not late, so you won’t be late for something because of your sleep patterns.

The Sense app provides you with a snapshot of your sleep last night. The app tells you the quality of your sleep by giving an overall sleeping score, from 0 to 100. The sleeping score depends on various factors that might interrupt your sleep. For example, if a garbage truck passed by your window at the middle of the night, the noise would reduce your sleeping score.

The Sense is developed by Hello Inc., a company based in San Francisco. The CEO and founder of Hello, James Proud, believes that an ideal sleeping tracker should be able to measure “what are the conditions of the bedroom that are having a positive or negative effect on your sleep. It’s how you slept, why you slept that way, and what are the steps you can take to begin to improve your sleep and wake up feeling better.”

The Sense is not designed to improve any medical conditions, but it could easily pick up factors that affect your sleep patterns. Thus, you can make changes to your room or your habits, according to the data gathered by the Sense.

As the Sense is currently raising funds on Kickstarter, it has a special price of $99 for the device. The price will be increased to $129 after the Kickstarter campaign. The first Sense is expected to come to market in November 2014.

What is your experience of using sleep-tracking gadgets? Share it in the comments!