AI Watches You Sleep—And Other Big Smart Home Systems

3D illustration of double bed hovering in air and with white cloud above. Blue toned computer graphics. Moody attitude.

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With new AI-powered mattresses, there’s no need to count sheep – but investors in these customized home systems are dreaming of dollars.

A company called Eight Sleep is pioneering a new kind of mattress that is bringing personal tracking to sleep design. Building on the idea of mattress personalization with sleep optimized temperature, positioning, and more, the Eight Sleep system uses continuous biometric tracking and collects a whole lot of information on the user, including:

• Heart rate
• Heart rate variability
• Body movement
• Bed and room temperature
• Sleep stages
• Breathing

It’s interesting to note that some of this is the same kind of data collected during the day by wearables like Whoop, and that Whoop itself is in an imbroglio with the FDA over whether blood pressure readings are inherently “medical” or not.

Your Sleep Twin

Then the system builds a digital twin of the person who is using the mattress. It includes things like a thermal response profile, or how somebody reacts to changes in temperature. Movement sensors and other tools collect information on body positioning, and put that into the mix, and if someone uses a fitness wearable throughout the day, for example, Whoop, that information can go into the hopper, too.

As for real time optimization, the system can warm or cool the bed to promote heart rate stabilization, or make recommendations, or provide a gentle wake-up using temperature.

In other words, the system is simulating a person‘s sleep in real time, and then intervening to help them sleep better each night.

Tossing and Turning

With a sophisticated array of piezoelectric sensors, the Eight Sleep system is fundamentally watching you sleep in real time.

If you try to visualize this, what you might come up with is a 3-D model of your body, with the system showing all of your little movements throughout the night. Then you add in your vital signs, including that heart rate variability over time, and you can imagine what kind of control the AI mattress can have over your sleep.

You might also be able to imagine what investors are thinking – that adoption of this kind of technology will be nearly universal eventually, and there are big plays to be made.

More AI Home Innovations

Lest we think that mattresses are the only thing getting a major makeover with artificial intelligence, here are a number of other new home systems that are similarly exciting to people who like lifestyle automation.

There’s something called Aura Air, an AI air quality system that monitors indoor and outdoor air quality to predict allergen spikes and detect items like mold, dust mites, smoke, and volatile organic compounds or VOCs.

In the kitchen, we have the Suvie 3.0 Robot Meal Prep System, where AI scheduling automatically refrigerates, cooks, and broils meals to get dinner ready on the user’s timeline – so when you get home, dinner’s done. Not to be outdone, the GE Profile Smart Mixer adjusts speed and power automatically, even taking into account factors like weather and altitude, to get just the right blend of ingredients.

For optimized home security, the Ring Always Home drone camera patrols your home on-demand, looking for and documenting suspicious activity. Then there’s the Vivint AI Security Hub, a whole-home system with behavioral AI, and the Glance Fire Detector, which predicts risks by analyzing environmental patterns, and employs sprinklers and ventilation systems.

If aesthetics is your thing, you can get smart windows with AI-tinted glass, and light sensors to control how much daylight you get according to your personalized needs. A Yale smart security lock lets you know if any strange locking or unlocking occurs, and integrates with items like Alexa.

Your Robot Butler

As for those long-awaited chore robots, check out the Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni which can vacuum and mop powered by lidar, and the LG Washtower, with features like fabric recognition and load sensing. One more good example of how all of this works is illustrated with the Foldimate laundry-folding robot, which can take clothes from the above-mentioned systems and capably fold them neatly.

This hits the central point about the value of visual automation- since the computer can “see” the clothes and understand the physics of folding them, it can do that tedious job that humans don’t want to do. We want folded laundry, but only the most meticulous of us want to spend the time to fold it at all, let alone well.

Importantly, I want to point out that this is not an advertisement. It’s a survey of some of the interesting items that were science fiction just a few years ago. I’m not endorsing any of these products, and there are probably alternatives to most of them. But having the concrete examples shows how these technologies work in our lives.

How much personal automation do you want in your home? Think about it as more of these modern systems come to market.