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Sleep Wearables

Oura ring puts a finger on how your sleep affects your day

Since the success of Fitbit, there’s been an endless parade of activity trackers offered through crowdfunding platforms and via traditional channels.

While many of these either treat sleep monitoring as a secondary feature or focus exclusively on the sleep experience, the Oura ring starts with sleep experience monitoring as a foundation for determining optimum activity levels. The ceramic scratch-resistant finger adornment gets an impressive three days of battery life from its tiny battery and charges in about an hour.

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Connected Objects Lighting

Fancy sleep tracking system lights the way to a good night’s rest

With the glut of sleep tracking apps all vying for consumers’ attention, companies have begun to package the sleep tracking experience in a multitude ways to differentiate themselves.

The oddly named Fancy struggles to stand out. It uses ambient lighting to influence a person’s sleep cycle, helping them to get a deeper rest and wake up gently. The system incorporates the Fancy lamp and an iDo Plus — a connected device that uses an accelerometer to track sleep movements and interface with the lamp. Tying everything together is the companion iOS/Android app allowing users to map out their sleep characteristics, download mobile statistics, and “download their dreams” (whatever that means).  The $100,000 AUD (~$78,545) campaign is looking to get the $129AUD (~$101) Fancy system out to backers by August 2015.

As different as this product is, it just isn’t that compelling in the wake of competitors. The SafeBand incorporate sleep tracking along with subtle vibrations, and products like Beddit and Luna have focused their efforts on making beds themselves smarter. Other products like the aforementioned Luna do the same job far better than Fancy, making it a tough sell. The extremely vague campaign doesn’t help, either, especially when it seems like there’s more to the product.

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Sensors/IoT Sleep

Smartphone-adjustable ThinkPillow measures sleep, wakes you up

Sleep is one of the most important ways to stay healthy. Sleeping resets mind, body, and soul, giving the chance for healing. However, most have trouble with their sleep patterns, either waking up in the middle of a REM cycle or sleeping for too short of a time.

ThinkPillow is a smart pillow that is fully adjustable in height and firmness. It is designed with special technology aimed at fixing any kind of spinal pain. Not only does it come with comfort, however, but it also tracks your sleep patterns. With this data, the accompanying smartphone app can choose when to wake you so that you’ll feel alert and refreshed instead of bedraggled and exhausted.

ThinkPillow’s smartphone app charts sleep patterns over time and, as such, can be useful to physicians if something goes wrong. In addition, it lets the user track what they’re doing three hours before bedtime and can make suggestions based on those habits. For instance, if the user isn’t getting enough sleep, but drinks coffee every night, the app will tell them to cut it out. ThinkPillow also spies on family members and lets users see the sleep patterns of mom, grandma, dad or whoever else uses the device.

Getting the right amount of sleep can be truly difficult. They say you should get out of bed when you initially wake up in the morning, but if that’s too early for some, they’d rather get another half an hour of sleep. It’s great that ThinkPillow can tell when the person is actually asleep, not just when they intend to be asleep, and uses that to wake them up in the morning. While well-intentioned, the family sharing feature may get a little annoying to some. Though it is good for elderly family members who are too far away to check up on. One ThinkPillow can be had for $102 NZD (~$79 USD) for estimated delivery in April 2015. This product hopes to raise $50,000 NZD (~$38,800 USD) on Kickstarter.

Categories
Connected Objects Sleep

Guidy lucid dream mask aids those choosing better snoozing

Lucid dreaming fascinates anyone who finds out about it, but once they realize how difficult it can be to induce, many quickly lose that interest. The creators of the Guidy don’t think it has to be so difficult. The product is a smart sleep mask equipped with Bluetooth connectivity, an accelerometer, and a gyroscope to detect REM-cycles with 100% accuracy. When it does, it sends you gentle, light-based reminders so that you can notice you’re dreaming. Once that’s done, your fantasies of running as fast as the Flash or living your life as Indiana Jones can finally be experienced. The creators are just hoping their €47,000 funding goal isn’t one, too. Get your hands on one for €80.

As novel as this product may seem, there have already been a few examples of lucid dreaming masks. One, called the DreamNet, is an alternative that utilizes an EEG and also syncs up with smartphones, but saves the data gained into a database filled with other dreamers using the same product. Remee is the cheapest alternative and also providing customizable LED reminders. Guidy combines the accuracy of the former with the customizable nature of the latter for their version of the lucid dreaming sleep mask, making it a product to look out for.