The world is getting smarter these days, and this doesn’t just mean the people in it. Our items are all getting smarter too. So called “smart” phones are getting faster and more clever all the time, but it’s not just the obvious items that are improving in this way. Many items that you wouldn’t normally associate with being “smart” are starting to get computer upgrades that allow them to give us more information than ever before about ourselves and our lives. A good example is the new innovation involving smart mattresses.
Learning How You Sleep
One example of this technology is the “Beddit” product. This gives you a thin sensor that you put under the sheets on your bed. It can then connect to your smart phone. The app associated with the product will help you monitor all sorts of different information about how you’re sleeping. For example, it will give you a way to track your heart rate throughout the night, how you’re breathing and how your breathing rhythm is going, how much you are moving around during sleep cycles, and even noise and light levels in the room. The app can give you a full timeline going from when you first fell asleep, and stretching through the beginning of deep sleep, the “recovery” period, how long you woke up for throughout the night, and so on. There are other similar technological approaches to this as well including entire beds that have it built in. Generally, the applications for this are widespread.
Medical Innovations
Researchers are often saying that sleeping well, and in general the way that you sleep and how you wake up can have a huge impact on how you feel throughout your day, how sharp you are, and so on. Technology like smart mattresses could revolutionize how we sleep in terms of health. It could allow doctors or individuals look for problems in an entirely new way. If you’re not sleeping through the night and feel grumpy the next day, traditionally there wouldn’t be a whole lot you could do about it since you wouldn’t know why it was happening. But with smart mattresses, you can now check to see if any noises or additional light sources occurred throughout the night that could explain why it’s happening. Once you know what occurred right before you woke up at 2 a.m., you may be able to fix it, such as checking to see if there are any motion detection lights shining through your window, and so on.
Waking Up Better
Another possible improvement is in terms of lifestyle. It’s pretty unpleasant to have to wake up to an alarm in the morning if you happen to be in deep sleep, for example. One feature that these smart apps have is the ability to set a special alarm that will monitor when you’re hitting a lighter stage in sleep, and to activate your alarm then, thus giving you a nice introduction to the day instead of grogginess. Once everyone sees how much more chipper people using this tech are in the morning, bed sales for such innovations will only pick up.
This is a guest post by writer and blogger Georgia Webster. In her writing, Georgia currently focuses on tech gadgets that could trigger healthy lifestyle changes.
