The smart mattress company is named one of IoT Innovator’s ’50 Most Innovative IoT Companies in 2017’
by Kim Kay
Eight Sleep’s smart mattress technology is the stuff of which dreams are made – quite literally. Over the past four-and-a-half years, the company has analyzed more than 1.8 million hours of sleep data to create a line of perfectly smart mattresses that seems to have cornered the market on the ever-elusive good night’s sleep.
Through cutting-edge and data-driven technology, Eight Sleep has effectively redesigned the traditional mattress, transforming it into a magical cradle of smarts that can improve your sleep. Indeed, since its inception in 2014, Eight Sleep has tested hundreds of mattress prototypes in its quest to help snoozers sleep better and wake up more refreshed. The result is a smart mattress engineered to deliver the perfect night’s sleep based on dual-zone temperature control, personalized sleep tracking and seamless smart home integrations.
On the surface, Eight Sleep is a mattress company, but at its core, it’s a business built on technology. The company’s belief that technology can measure, understand and optimize the ways people sleep – which ultimately leads to a healthier, happier life – is what struck IoT Innovator’s judging panel, naming Eight Sleep one of its 50 Most Innovative IoT Companies in 2017.
IoT Innovator’s inaugural Top 50 awards – which span multiple IoT markets across the globe, including Enterprise, Automotive, Consumer, Healthcare, Industrial and Safety – honor the most cutting-edge and contemporary companies that are helping to turn today’s IoT landscape into an undeniably fertile one.
Got it covered
Eight Sleep’s dreamy technology lies within its Sleep Tracker smart mattress cover, which monitors all of the elements that contribute to optimum sleep – including heart and respiratory rates; bed and room temperatures; how often you toss and turn throughout the night; and when you’re in deep sleep versus light sleep. The cover can also wake you at an ideal time based on your personal sleep cycle.
Under the hood (or the covers, as it were), the Sleep Tracker – which is basically a sensor layer that easily fits over any mattress – is powered by a hub with an unobtrusive cord that plugs into the wall. Once plugged in, the smart cover gets busy connecting to the WiFi-enabled devices in your house, reviewing your sleep data, and revving up its dual-zone warming feature.
The Sleep Tracker connects to an app on your phone and also can be synced to your smart home. With everything from guided meditation and soothing sounds to a smart alarm and a daily Sleep Report, the app is a tool not just for how to sleep but also how to do it smarter.
Settling the sleep score
If the app is your tool for learning how to sleep smarter, then the Sleep Report acts as your personalized sleep news, letting you know when you got into bed, when you fell asleep, when you got out of bed, and everything in between. Each morning, the report will generate your sleep score for the night before, which is based on the amount of time spent sleeping multiplied by the number of tosses and turns.
The upshot to uncovering all of these sleep trends is that, even if you assume you’re getting a good night’s sleep, you may not be. Knowing this can help you fine-tune your sleeping habits. You can even sync the app with other health tracker apps such as Apple Heath Kit and Google Fit to further observe your sleep and overall health.
The least alarming alarm ever
The smart alarm is yet another feature nestled within the Sleep Tracker that rings our bell. Thanks to the smart cover’s ability to determine when you’re sleeping lightly, the smart alarm is able to rouse you during your lightest sleep cycle, when you’re naturally the most awake. It does this via sensors in the cover that detect the changes in your body movements, breathing and heart rate.
The alarm rings on your phone, with sounds designed to soothe you into an awakened state – natch – so that you’ll wake up more rested and refreshed. To enable the smart alarm, snoozers simply set it in the Eight Sleep app so that it can wake them within a 30-minute range of their desired wake up time or whenever they’re in a light sleep.
Warming to the idea of temperature control
Studies show that your bedroom should be kept at a temperature of 68 degrees for optimal sleep, but that your bed itself should be warm enough to help you relax. That’s where Eight Sleep’s temperature control feature comes in and warms the heart (literally), with dual zone temperature controls that allow you and your bedfellow to select different warming levels for each side of the bed. You can choose from 10 different temperature levels with a simple tap on the app that activates micro heating elements embedded in the smart cover.
Nothing else mattress
Eight Sleep’s trio of mattresses – including the The Saturn+, the Jupiter+ and the Mars+ – range in thickness and firmness but customers can rest assured (again, literally) that all three models were designed based on 10 million hours of sleep data.
The Saturn+ has three layers of premium foams and the Jupiter has four layers of dynamic reactive foams, while the Mars+ is the king of the heap with its hybrid of four-inch foam-wrapped coils and three soft foam layers. This combination yields medium-soft firmness and more breathability than a solid foam design. Essentially, with the Mars+, you get both the bounce of a regular mattress and the contour of a foam mattress.
On the off chance that your Eight Sleep mattress doesn’t send you into a blissfully smart slumber, then the company offers a 100-day return policy so you can send it back with no questions asked. The only question remaining, then, seems to be whether this smart mattress company that sleeps and breathes technology – all in the name of the perfect night’s sleep – is for real. The answer? You’d bed-ter believe it.
