Samsung to watch you sleep with a mattress tracker

It’s not unusual for a fitness tracker to be able to monitor your sleeping patterns, but what about a dedicated tracker for your sleeping? That’s coming, and Samsung is responsible for it.

We always like to be surprised, and this past week, we saw a few of these. In fact, one of these surprises wasn’t for speakers or a new type of TV, and while a 4K smartphone was a nice surprise, it wasn’t quite the same sort of consumer tech surprise Samsung decided to bring to the IFA consumer technology showcase in Berlin, Germany this year.

To really throw you a bit of a curve, Samsung will this year give you the opportunity to study how you sleep, tracking information about your heart rate, respiratory rate, while looking at your movement when you sleep.

This information will be tabulated into a personalised briefing, charting how well you sleep against your age, while offering recommendations on how to improve your sleep via a mobile app.

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That’s the idea, anyway, with Samsung’s “SleepSense” offering this tracking technology, with the gadget also able to track how much time you spent asleep, how many times you woke up, how often you were in a deep sleep, and how much time you were engaged in rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, the latter of which is another way of saying how often you were dreaming.

Making this happen will be sensor that is slipped under the mattress instead of being worn, as is the case with current sleep trackers built into fitness bands. The technology inside this sensor has also been developed to be fairly smart, and Samsung says it will even be able to talk to other Samsung appliances, such as the TV when you’re falling asleep, or an air conditioner to change the temperature based on how you’re sleeping.

Of course, to make the connection between these devices — that “internet of things” you’re probably hearing about — you’ll need Samsung devices all over your home, at least in this initial stage. We suspect later on Samsung will open this up to more brands, as open standards are generally preferred, but right now, you’ll need a Samsung ecosystem to get the most use out of the SleepSense.

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As for availability, there’s a good chance SleepSense will be coming to Australia, with Mike Lilly, Samsung’s Head of Home Appliances for Australia, quoted as saying “we’re excited to announce that Samsung SleepSense will launch in Australia. We look forward to providing more details around pricing and availability for the SleepSense very soon.”

We’ll let you know more about SleepSense when we hear about it, or even when we sleep on it.