The FCC Gave Amazon Permission to Track Your Sleep
Amazon seems to be planning new devices that can monitor your movement while you sleep, among other things.
Amazon has received FCC approval to use motion-sensing radar sensors in a product designed to monitor your movement while you sleep.
The FCC said Amazon “plans to use the radar’s capability of capturing motion in a three-dimensional space to enable contactless sleep tracing functionalities” in a “non-mobile” device that requires external power to function. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because Google uses similar technology in the second-generation Nest Hub, and the FCC noted that Amazon’s device would operate “at identical power levels and technical parameters as those granted to Google in a 2018 waiver order.”
The Google Nest Hub’s ability to monitor your sleep via radar sensors informed the FCC’s decision to grant Amazon’s request for a nearly identical waiver. The commission said that “treating Amazon’s request in a similar fashion to our grant of the Google Waiver will benefit the American public by fostering added competition and enabling the development of additional 60 GHz radar products and applications.” Google effectively cleared the way for Amazon and, potentially, other competitors.
Amazon said in its request to the FCC that it would also use the radar sensors to offer “significant benefits to consumers with mobility, speech, or tactile impairments” by allowing them to “engage with a device and control its features through simple gestures and movements” instead of requiring them to use touch-based controls. Bloomberg noted that movement-based controls were also a core part of the Fire Phone that didn’t exactly go out in a blaze of glory after its inauspicious debut.
The FCC’s decision could help Amazon realize its ambitions for the health and wellness market, but even if the company’s desire to monitor people’s sleep doesn’t catch on with consumers, enabling alternative control schemes should make the company’s other devices more accessible.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
