CES 2018: Merging health tracking and smart home tech
Nokia has blended smart home tech and advanced sleep sensing with the new Nokia Sleep, unveiled at CES 2018.
Nokia Sleep is a sensor pad, which slips under the mattress, and is able to monitor sleep quality. It will keep tabs on movement and sleep duration and interruptions, light, deep and rapid-eye-movements phases and snoring.
It’s a essentially revamp of the Withings Aura sleep tracker, the company which Nokia bought out in 2016. However, it’s a pared back idea, which ditches heart rate tracking which somewhat undermines the quality of the sleep tracking – and the bedside ambient light and speaker is also discarded.
The Nokia Sleep will provide you with a sleep score every night, grading the quality of your kip. But the really interesting parts of Nokia Sleep are ideas around the smart home, which makes it unique as a sleep tracking device.
Using IFTTT controls (If This Then That applets, capable of linking actions together in the smart home), you can programme the Nokia Sleep to control your home. Ideas would include turning your smart lights off when you get into bed, turning the thermostat to the perfect sleep temperature or playing some relaxing mood music.
While there are plenty of sleep monitors on the market, we’ve rarely seen this approach, which looks at the environmental aspects of sleep and uses the smart home to control them.
What will be key, for our money, is how much Nokia Sleep guides you to creating a good smart home experience for sleep. What is the best temperature? What hues, shades and brightness percentages are best for you lighting? Data driven recommendations would truly make Nokia Sleep a powerful smart home accessory.
And that’s not the end of the smart home announcements from Nokia. The Health Mate app that stores all your data from Nokia Sleep and the company’s array of fitness tracking wearables is now getting Alexa support. That means you’ll be able to check in on your goal progress with Alexa, rather than fire up the app.
Nokia Sleep will be available Q1 2018 for “less than £100”.