Future Living: Sense Sleep Tracker
Future Living is an ongoing series focused on smarthome and other web connected products. In this series, I take a look into how these smart products can make our lives easier and more convenient.
Sleep is an integral part of our lives. Most of us unfortunately do not get enough sleep every night. Those of us that do, might still wake up feeling groggy for a multitude of reasons. We live in a world where everything from our coffeemakers to our watches are becoming web connected and intelligent. Store shelves are lined with fitness trackers designed to motivate us to get out and get active. Every tech company seems solely focused on our time while we are awake. Enter Hello, a company out of San Francisco that recently raised over 2.4 million dollars in their Kickstarter campaign for their product: the Sense Sleep Tracker. Now that their Kickstarter has ended, you can purchase Sense for $129 from their website
Kickstarter projects around hardware products begin and fizzle out on a daily basis. The Sense Sleep tracker found a large niche of nearly 20,000 backers during their campaign. Hello was onto something with the idea of tracking sleep conditions and quality. With all Kickstarter products, there was plenty of reason to worry about quality and consistency. Here are my thoughts about using Sense consistently for some time now.
First off, Sense is impeccably designed. The Sense sleep tracker looks like a futuristic birds nest that one might find themselves resting inside of in the future. Sense comes in two colors, white and black, or “cotton” and “charcoal” as Hello likes to call them. My model is the “charcoal” option. The device itself is not very large at all, about the size of a tennis ball. The Sense tracks ambient light, sound, temperature, humidity and your movement(this is achieved by utilizing the Sleep Pill, which I’ll get to in a bit). Sense is powered by your standard MicroUSB connection, which we all have thousands of laying around. But the Sense MicroUSB cord actually fits perfectly into the base of the Sense itself, a small but gorgeous design decision. When it is time for bed, the Sense becomes completely dormant, though. It will not light up and annoy you in any way, allowing you to forget about it and focus on sleep.
The Sense also comes with a mandatory satellite device, the Sleep Pill. The Sleep Pill is a quarter-sized clip that attaches to your pillowcase to track your movement throughout the night. One is included with every Sense, with others being available to purchase for $59. The Sleep Pill runs off a 3V coin cell battery that is simple enough to replace, but you should only need to do so once a year.
Both of these devices connect via Bluetooth 4.0 to one another and to your device. Setup was simple enough, plug in your Sense, fire up the app, pair Sense to your phone, shake the Sleep Pill like a maraca(which is what they should add to their setup guide as what you’re doing), and you’re ready to sleep. On iOS the setup was a breeze, on Android, not so much. Either my phone or my Sense was throwing a constant hissy fit throughout the whole ordeal(doing some research into the issue myself, it was my WiFi). I switched over to an iOS device and finished up the process with no issue. However, this is not something everyone can do. Knowing this, I went to fire an email over to their support to try to figure out if this was a common issue. To my surprise, they had already emailed me. Hello noticed I was having issues getting my Sense up and running and sent me an email. Something you don’t see every day from a company.
Sense has a companion app for both Android and iOS, both of which are intuitively designed on both platforms(looking at you, Twitter). Inside the Sense app, you can see your previous night sleep score, data from the various sensors inside Sense, your average sleep score and duration over the past week, and statistics on your sleep.
Looking at your previous night sleep gives the user the ability to look into their sleeping habits in one easy to read list. The app lists when your lights go off, when you get into bed, and when you ultimately fall asleep. Your level of sleep, ranging from light sleep to deep sleep, is shown by blue bars along the timeline. The darker the blue, the deeper the sleep.
Sense will also notify you of any disturbances in your sleep throughout the night. Sense will notice many things during your sleep such as tossing and turning, noise, and light disturbances.
All of these different variables during your sleep filter into a score out of 100. This is your sleep score. Your sleep score is a quick way for you to check your quality of sleep from the previous night. In my usage, my average score was roughly 85, not bad. As you use Sense, your overall goal is to achieve a higher sleep score.
This can be made possible by looking at all the data that Sense collects. Inside the Sense app, you are able to see all of these different variables. Sense takes it a step further and gives you tips to reduce light, sound, and keep your room cool. Sense also educates you as the user on how much sleep the normal person needs. Sense gives you information on the effects of light, temperature, and movement and what it does to your sleep. All to help you get a better nights rest.
Sense does all of these things for you. But what is it actually like to use? Once setup is completed, you don’t have to do much. You clip the Sleep Pill to your pillowcase, put Sense on your nightstand, and go about your normal schedule. Sense is always there, silently learning about your sleep schedule and habits. For the most part, Sense was incredibly accurate at figuring out when I got into bed, when the lights went out, and when I woke up. One thing it would get wrong was when I actually fell asleep. When I get into bed, I don’t go to sleep right away. I normally watch a show on Netflix or aimlessly stare at my phone. Not the best habit, I know. But at first Sense wouldn't pick up on it. Then, it did. The Sense app periodically pushes questions to you, asking about your sleep habits. After about a week, Sense asked me if I do anything in bed before I fall asleep. I answered and literally overnight Sense was more accurate to when I fell asleep.
That’s the crazy thing about Sense. It takes data and it quantifies it. Whether that data is environmental, or data about you. Sense takes it all to learn your sleep habits and environment, all to help you get a better night sleep. When you look at fitness trackers, they show your activity, but rarely do anything with that data to help you. Sense is one of the first products that takes in data, and quantifies it in a way that is helpful to the person using it. This is the killer feature of Sense, the ability to actually improve the lives of those that use it.
Using Sense thus far has been an absolute delight. It has shown great insight into my sleep habits, and how I can improve them. Sense might not be for everyone, but if you are constantly tired from a poor night of sleep, Sense might just be for you.
Sense doesn't feel like a Kickstarter project. Sense was very obviously a well thought out product before it hit Kickstarter. I had the opportunity to talk to CEO and Founder of Hello, James Proud earlier this week. In our conversation, we spoke about Sense and using Kickstarter.
Below is an abridged account of what we discussed
How often will Sense get updates, will it auto update or will there be some user approval needed?
The Sense firmware has been silently updated in the background multiple times since launch. The Sense itself is constantly getting small updates to better track your sleep.
On the App end, we want to push updates with fixes as often as possible to ensure the best experience.
You had an update to Kickstarter backers nearly every two to three weeks with progress on Sense. How important was having that transparency going into a Kickstarter campaign for you?
When you look at a lot of Kickstarter projects, and what people expect. When we started we already had a team together. Had talent in place, rather than just a few guys with a vision. We ensured that manufacturing was of the highest quality.
Sense is a little sensitive to when I fall asleep because sometimes I’m just lying in bed and it claims I’m asleep, is this a common issue you’ve found and if so, is there any software updates in the works to address it? The funny thing is, with this question, Sense has been asking me question about my pre-sleep habits. Asking if I do things in bed before I fall asleep, and the issue has subsided.
It’s a difficult problem, and occasional problem. The feedback the app asks for helps learn about you to tweak their algorithm. Having tens and thousands of Senses in homes. Not just algorithmic-ally looking at you, but actually asking you questions to learn about you specifically. Which allows you to learn more about your sleep as Sense learns about you.
Sense is really good at taking in a lot of data with remarkable accuracy. Sense takes it a step further and quantifies the data, by recommending changes you can make to your sleeping environment. Are there any other ways you will look to quantify this data in the future?
Of course, look at what you see now. When we collect this information, our biggest thing at Hello, we have so much info about your sleep. How can we interpret this back and tell you things we learn about you and help you more. Once we’re gathering all this information, we’ll have a depth of information. Sense is always there, continuously learning, continuously tracking. It’s a lot like losing weight. It’s not an overnight fix. But in the long run, it will pay off by doing the job it needs to night in and night out.
Can I get a life size Sense to sleep in? It looks so peaceful and futuristic
If you build a prototype you could Kickstarter it. I’d be a backer.
