Why Sleep Monitoring Hardware Could Be Apple's Next Move

When you’re awake, there are various applications within your iPhone or Apple Watch that can tell you how your day is going.

- Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan

THE MISSING LINK IN WELLBEING DATA

From calories burned to stairs climbed, and how steady your heart rate has been throughout; from waking in the morning to hitting the hay again at night, you can access it all. But what about that long, peaceful stretch between the two, when you’re asleep?

The Bedtime app on the iPhone provides sleep analysis, but doesn’t report how much you’ve slept or moved, or how long you spent in bed. Similarly, the Apple Watch also doesn’t track sleep or time spent under the duvet. With one third of our lives spent sleeping (if all goes to plan), that’s a vast stretch of time that we never really understand beyond how peacefully we feel we’ve slept.

With Apple renowned for offering wellness features to those who want them, it’s therefore no surprise that rumors of specialist sleep-monitoring hardware have begun to circulate. It’s nearly 18 months since Apple acquired Finnish company Beddit, which makes sleep-tracking devices that work with both iOS and Apple Watch to analyze sleep.

On November 22, Apple’s patent application for a “multi-element piezo sensor for in-bed physiological measurements” was published, having been originally filed six months before. This suggests that Apple are taking the Beddit concept much further, and fully realizing new hardware that will monitor users’ sleep at a level previously unavailable beyond specialist, medical-grade devices. So, how will this work?

BEDTIME, BEDDIT, AND BEYOND