For those of us that struggle with a good night’s sleep, there’s a lot of tech out there designed to monitor what’s going on.
Unfortunately, most of it requires being strapped to your body.
If you want to sleep unencumbered and still have metrics ready for perusal with the morning bowl of cornflakes, Amazon’s newest gadget is for you.
It’s called the Halo Rise and its both a sleep tracker and an alarm clock designed to sit on your bedside table and watch you while you snooze.
There aren’t any cameras or microphones. Instead it uses low-energy sensor technology and machine learning to study your breathing. It can also pick up on humidity, temperature and light in your bedroom to build up a better picture of your sleeping environment.
According to Amazon, the device: ‘accurately senses respiration and movement patterns to determine your sleep stages throughout the night.
‘It uses a sleep algorithm that has been trained and validated against overnight polysomnography—the clinical gold standard for sleep analysis.’
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At present, the Halo Rise is only avaialble in the United States, but it’s likely that – if successful – Amazon will release it over here too. It’s priced at $140 (£127) and doubles up as an alarm clock and wake-up light.
What about the data?
Amazon says the Halo Rise sends its data to the cloud, where machine learning converts it into sleep stages. During transit, all data is encrypted and is automatically deleted from the cloud after 10 days.
Amazon also says it won’t sell any collected health data or use it for any marketing, product recommendations or advertising.
Owners will also be able to download and delete their health data and the Rise only analyses the person nearest to it – not any others that happen to be in the bed.
Amazon also says the Halo Rise’s algorithms are only trained to detect sleep and not any, ahem, other activity in the bedroom.
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