NuYU, the latest start-up attacking the health and fitness gadget space, has launched their $500 sleep pod system, which promises to get you the best night sleep of your life. Their connected sleep pad – we’ll come to what the heck one of those is in a minute – joins their NuYu activity tracker with connected smart-scales which launched back in September. Together the three units make for an aggressive push into this increasingly crowded space, traditionally dominated by the likes of Fitbit, Jawbone and more recently, the likes of Asus and Samsung.
Whilst the companies fitness band joins an incredibly tough market place, and their smart scales are hardly unique, their sleep pad is something a lot more radical and new. The system uses a water controlled mechanism in order to precisely change the temperature in your bed. What really catches the eye is the systems ability to not only warm the bed on those cold winter mornings – which is especially useful as we rapidly fly through fall – but also the systems ability to cool the bed. Anybody who has spent any time in hot bedrooms knows that an overly hot bed is a bigger sleeping problem than a cold one, so this is solving a real world pain problem which I’ve never seen adequately attacked before.
Where this system gets really smart is how it ties in with your sleep cycle. NuYu’s research indicates that the ideal sleeping temperature changes through the night and is actually dependant on the stage of sleep that your in. Many of us are familiar with the concepts of light early sleep followed by deeper ‘rapid eye movement’ or REM sleep. What we’re less aware of is how our bodies needs changes dependant on which stage we’re in.
So you use the systems iOS or Android app to set your beds temperature before you get in. This warms the bed, ensuring you avoid the pang of cold on a winters morning (or lightly cools it if its hot outside). The temperature is kept warmer as you fall asleep, with the slight warmth helping make you more woozy, aiding you in dropping off. As you fall asleep the system then cools down, helping your body stay at its optimum temperature for the REM sleep cycle. The system then changes the temperature – gradually warming the bed – to aid you in waking up, which also ties in with your sleep cycle.
For me, this is the next iteration of smart tech. Activity trackers have long since had a sleep monitoring solution, but this is a great example of how our smart devices should evolve to ‘talk’ together in order to bring value that we couldn’t otherwise get. Sleep monitoring stats and analytics have some standalone value, allowing you to analyse sleeping patterns and work on making changes. On balance though, most of us are quite aware of how well we sleep at night. What’s harder, bar making smart pre-bed choices, is actually impacting how well we sleep.
So when a tech stack, like that compiled here by NuYu, emerges it can quickly appear to be simplistic genius. As we move in to 2016, I fully expect more examples like this to emerge, where smart tech combines to bring added value.
Those of us who value our health and fitness know that it takes a good nights sleep to overcome a hard workout. Anything that helps with that should be cherished by the fitness community and those who love the fitness gadgets that we traditionally cover here at BurnTech.TV.
The NuYu Sleep System costs $500 and is available from such retailers as Amazon, Bed Bath, & Beyond, and Hammecher Schlemmer.
The NuYu activity tracker is available here on Amazon, for $50
The NuYu smart scales are available on Amazon here, priced at $46.25
You can learn more on the official website here – http://www.healthometernuyu.com/sleep-system