Technology for sleep, in evidence last year, grew enough to get its own zone for the first time in 2017. Monitoring has matured past wearable devices, and has kept up with the shift from reporting to coaching. Many more products can now intervene during the night, claiming to improve the quality of your sleep. This is another new area of development for delegation and trust.

Monitoring

As interested as “quantified self” enthusiasts are in measuring anything, even they struggle with the practicalities (comfort, charging) of wearing a device in bed. The result is more non-contact monitoring solutions. Beddit and Emfit, for example, both have sensors that sit underneath the mattress and provide detailed data. Emfit’s data includes heart-rate variability (HRV) which has many well-established diagnostic uses.

The Hearts.bio smart pillow includes a protected central pocket for which they promise a monitoring device as one option. The same pocket can also hold an Amazon Echo Dot, which is intriguing.

The wider health theme of moving from pure monitoring to coaching was strongly evident in sleep.

Intervening

Many vendors go beyond monitoring, intervening in ways they claim will improve your sleep.

Sleepace has another non-contact monitor that controls a bedside light with Bluetooth. Oria’s olfactory alarm clock (which could wake you with the smell of toast or — sadly a Vegas myth — of money) has matured into the Sensorwake which claims to regulate your whole sleep cycle using appropriate scents.

The REMI sleep companion tackles the main cause of sleeplessness in parents — their children — with a smart alarm clock that encourages children to sleep for longer with an expressive face as feedback.

More actively still, Moona controls the temperature of your pillow throughout the night, citing research about head temperature being important to sleep. Smart Nora is an air bag that you insert into your pillow, and which then moves your head when it hears you start to snore. The REM-fit Zeeq smart pillow also does this and incorporates tracking and music playing too.

Fully embracing interventional sleep is the 360 Smart Bed by Sleep Number. It independently adjusts position and temperature for each sleeping partner, claiming that warm feet make you drop off more quickly, and small position changes eliminate snoring.

Though they are early steps, these intervention technologies are consistent with the rise of delegation. They promise improved quality of life with no intervention from the user (who is asleep, after all). They also imply a great deal of trust: to what other vendor do you hand over control of a third of your life, when you are at your most vulnerable? Products like the Smart Bed 360 create a whole new attack surface.