This Smart Bed’s Got Your Number: Self-Adjusting, Feet-Warming, and Snore-Stopping
We’ve all seen those late-night infomercials for Sleep Number beds—you know, the ones that lift the head of the mattress to make you more comfortable while reading, and allow you and your bed partner to choose different comfort settings. Perhaps you, too, have spent a few post-midnight-refrigerator-raid moments watching the mattresses change position and adjust firmness at the push of a button.
But Sleep Number beds definitely aren’t a thing of the past. The technology gets more impressive with each passing year, and they’re clearly integral to a fully-equipped smart home.
Sleep Number unveiled its latest innovation at the CES 2017 trade show in Las Vegas, and it’s more intuitive and adaptive than ever. The 360 Smart Bed uses biometric sleep tracking to sense how you’re moving around at night, and what would make you the most comfortable. It’ll even detect snoring and elevate your head to stop it, and measure your quality of sleep through your heart rate, breathing, and how you toss and turn. Plus, a foot-warming area instantly makes climbing between the sheets more comfortable, even when it’s cold outside.
A sensor at the end of the bed transmits your biometric data to an app on your smartphone via Bluetooth, giving you a score in the morning that represents how well you slept. This “Sleep IQ” is pretty interesting in itself, especially for those of us who have trouble staying asleep throughout the night or getting what feels like restorative rest. Info points include the time you spent in bed, how long it took you to fall asleep and how much of your night was spent out of bed or moving around. You can set goals for the amount of time you’d like to spend sleeping, and experiment with settings that will help you fall asleep faster.
The bed responds to this data automatically, shifting and changing until it gets everything just right, with different settings for each side. The technology that accomplishes this is embedded into both the mattresses and bed bases, physically moving the mattress up and down and inflating or deflating air chambers to fine-tune your position.
On top of all that (literally) is a section of comfort padding that comes in a variety of options, depending on how luxuriously fluffy you like your mattress to be. The SleepIQ app can also connect the bed to other gadgets and apps, like Fitbits and Nest Thermostats, combining the data to give you new insight on how your physical activity and the temperature of your home affects your sleep.
It sees you when you’re sleeping—it knows when you’re awake. It might not be making value judgments on whether you’ve been bad or good, but it will bring you some gifts either way.
Naturally, all of this high-level sleep customization doesn’t come cheap; while Sleep Number hasn’t released pricing for its brand new smartphone-connected line just yet, its current mattresses range in price between $800 and $7,099, depending on quality and features. The 360 series will be available later this year.
