As our lives become faster and stress levels increase, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sleep peacefully at night. In order to help people in this regard, a Finnish company named Beddit has come up with a $149 sleep tracker that uses a thin film sensor on your mattress. This company has been making sleep trackers for medical professionals for quite some time.
This sensor can send data to your smartphone. The data tells you when you have been snoring and when you have fallen into a deep sleep. The makers say that the sensor can measure detailed data like your heart rate during the night. The company is a start – up, and managed to raise $80,000 of funding through a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo. The backers got a $50 discount on the actual price of $149, and the sensor was all ready and shipped in November last year.
The company has been around for quite some time – since 2006, and they wanted to bring to the market an economical consumer product. But, the cost (manufacturing and selling) – at $669 – was the deterring factor.
The company has been focusing on basic monitoring in hospitals, providing them mechanisms that would allow them to monitor heart rate and breathing without touching the patient. They then wanted to bring this technology to the consumer in the form of a mobile app, and have been working on this for quite some time.
There are a number of activity tracking devices that use accelerometers, like Jawbone and Fitbit, and they are Beddit’s direct competitors. But, Beddit focuses only on sleep.
The device uses ballistocardiography, with a sensor that is sensitive enough to measure the mechanical forces that come from your heart beat, your pattern of breathing, and the way you move in bed. The sensor is nothing more than a thin strip of film that has an adhesive on one side that helps it stick to your mattress. You won’t require any batteries because all it needs is a low – voltage power supply from a USB port. It can connect to your smart phone via Bluetooth, like various other activity trackers. In the app, you will be able to see a timeline of your sleep activity through the night and gives you a quality score. It also tracks light and sound from your smart phone and tells you whether these factors might be contributing to a disturbed sleep. The app also has a smart alarm clock that can wake you up in a certain time frame when you would be sleeping lightly. In addition, it will tell you ways to improve the quality of your sleep.
The company has raised around $2.5 million in angel and government investment and has not yet gone for a full venture round.
It is quite surprising that we spend around one- third of our life sleeping, and yet, we do not know about how we actually sleep (well or poor). And when we go about finding it out, the results are quite surprising.
Know more at http://www.beddit.com
(The writer is an entrepreneur, inventor and co-founder of Possibillion Technologies)
