Hello, the company behind sleep sensing monitor Sense, is ready to start shipping. Over the next week or so, the company will make its sleep-tracking hardware and software generally available to consumers who want to have a more rewarding sleep.
Sense hopes to provide better data around how well people are sleeping, and what’s keeping them from sleeping better. As my colleague Kim-Mai Cutler reported, Sense is a sleep tracking system that measure the heat, humidity, noise, and ambient light that is in your room whenever you try to fall asleep. With data about each of those variables, the Sense device can not only measure how well you slept, but also make suggestions that could help you improve your sleep.
After several months in pre-order, the company is announcing that devices will begin shipping out to customers. The hardware consists of a spherical device that does most environmental measurement, along with a clip-on “sleep pill” that connects to a user’s pillow and keeps track of nocturnal activity. It’s augmented by a mobile app designed to bring together data from both devices and provide suggestions about how to improve your sleep.
Sense raised nearly $2.5 million in its Kickstarter campaign, and that’s on top of $10.5 million that it raised from angel investors. With that funding, the company hopes to improve the way that we live — starting with sleep.
While other activity- and fitness-tracking devices provide analytics without much context, Hello actually wants to help you improve your sleep. As a result, it gives suggestions about what users can do to improve the environment in which they’re trying to get some shut eye. That could mean reducing the ambient noise, or lowering the curtains, or even just putting your phone down before bed.
But while sleep is an important metric, it’s not the only one Hello can use to improve your well-being. Over time, the startup will likely look to other means of improving users’ lives.
Now that it’s completed its pre-order campaign, the company is shipping product. With more data, Sense could hopefully become more useful. At least in the 1/3 of each day we find ourselves asleep.