At a certain point during the last week, I found myself wandering the halls of CES, looking for the gadget that would fix all of my problems. Maybe it’s the modern condition, or just a sign of having been involved in this industry for far too long.
Technology, of course, has a long and sometimes spotty history of attempting to resolve problems it exacerbated in the first place. Fighting fire with fire, as it were. The Nintendo Wii, for instance, was heralded as fight against a sedentary population to which video games have significantly contributed. Hell, Fitbit helped build an entire industry out of it.
Having utterly matured the world of wearable fitness devices, however, the industry has moved on to the next bit frontier: sleep. There’s about a dozen reasons why sleeping with your smartphone is a bad idea, but I’ve woken up with an iPhone imprint on the side of my face more times than I’d care to admit. We know it’s bad and yet, we still do it. But the depths of our addiction are a topic for another time.
The science of sleep is a massively growing industry. Quoting myself from a recent story on sleep aid delivery startup, Remise, in 2017, sleep aids generated $69.5 billion, globally, with the number expected to hit $101 billion by 2023. If all or most of us were getting anywhere the amount of sleep we think we need, however, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Medications — both prescription and over the counter — are certainly a big piece of that puzzle. The question ultimately, however, is what you’re more more comfortable placing dependencies in. As someone who gets an embarrassingly little amount of sleep night to night, things can feel pretty helpless. It’s nearly enough to put faith in some piece of reconfigured smartphone components.
The category was everywhere this year at CES. Someone I spoke to who’s heavily involved in crowdfunding campaigns joked that sleep was all the rage two or three years ago. In 2020, however, the wave appears to really be crashing on the consumer market.
It’s a potential cash cow for any company that can truly crack the code, and recent massive investments in the category of meditation and mindfulness have demonstrated that VCs are interested in the promise of helping users rewire their brains for the positive. And then there are the several direct-to-consumer mattress companies, who have disrupted the industry by jamming product in impossibly small boxes.
Devices on display at CES largely fell into a few categories:
- Those designed to simply track sleep;
- Those designed to train the brain into sleeping better; and
- Those designed to change the sleep environment.
There’s plenty of variation in each, of course (and significant overlap). The first one, includes everything from wearable trackers to smart beds. The third includes products like Restore alarm clock, the Ebb Therapeutic temperature control headband and the Climate360 temperature controlled smart bed (obviously there’s a pretty large range of price points, as well). The second is probably the most uniform of the bunch, including the URGOnight and the Muse S. Full disclosure: I’m currently testing the latter for a future review. They operate on the principle that if you induce better sleep by training your brain.
There are some notable additions that fit less comfortably in one group. Take Withings’ latest smartwatch that aims to diagnose sleep apnea. The company is seeking FCC funding, so it may be a while before it hits the market, but expect that functionality to be the next big things in smartwatches after the addition of EKG readings. We know for a fact that Fitbit is already doing trials for its own take on the feature. It will no doubt be interesting to see how such a health feature takes shape under the Google umbrella.
Perhaps some of those mentioned above will stick around. As tends to be the case with these trends, more will likely fade away, with some of their technologies appearing in products by much far larger companies looking to capitalize on a trend. As long as technology continues to disrupt and generally reduce the quality of our sleep, however, there’s going to be plenty of opportunities to make a mint helping users attempt to get some of it back.
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