The smart home tech designed to help you sleep that actually works

Sleep is a fundamental aspect of life. Most people spend around a third of their life in slumber and it’s this nightly re-fresh that keeps you re-energised for the day ahead.

If you’re struggling to nod off at night, smart home technology is here to help. There is a huge range of gadgets on offer today, from giving you feedback on how you sleep to helping stop you snoring.

Here’s some of the best smart sleep technology on the market right now that actually works.

Smart Nora

This clever device is built to stop you snoring and can help snorers (and their long-suffering partners) get a better night’s sleep. The Smart Nora is little pad that you slip into your pillow. It has a paired Bluetooth gadget which ‘listens’ for the sound of snoring. When it’s triggered by a noise, the device in your pillow inflates and ‘jogs’ the snorer’s head, stopping the snoring without waking you up.

Amazon Echo

Amazon’s ‘smart speaker’ is loaded with skills to help people get to sleep. You can ask your Echo, for instance, “Alexa, play sleeping sounds on Amazon Music,” and if you want a sleep timer, just say, “Alexa, set a sleep timer for one hour.” There are lots of Alexa skills which can help too. Just open the Alexa app, and search, ‘Sleep’ to see a range of options.

Homni Terraillon smart lamp

This sleep-promoting ‘smart lamp’ soothes you off to the land of nod with a customisable ambient light show and relaxing sounds via its Bluetooth speakers. The lamp has temperature and light sensors to work out if your bedroom has the ideal environment for you to fall asleep. It also comes with a separate ‘Dot’ sensor which slots into your pillow and tracks how well you sleep using motion sensors. The next day, you can see a graph of how you slept on the device’s app and it will offer tips on what you’re doing wrong sleep-wise.

Sleepscore Max

Fitness bangles such as the Fitbit can offer you a graph of how you slept, but this bedside sensor offers a far more detailed view of your night’s sleep. It ‘bounces’ radio waves off your sleeping form to sense how you’re sleeping (it’s so detailed you can watch your breathing in the paired app). In the morning, you get an extremely detailed graph showing how much of your night is the various parts of a sleep cycle (REM, light, deep) and helpful tips on how to sleep better.

Sleep Number 360 Smart Bed

If you want to go the whole hog, you can buy a ‘smart bed’ that is loaded with a whole variety of hi-tech features to get you off to sleep and keep you there. The app-controlled Sleep Number ‘smart bed’ senses your movements, then adjusts the bed’s firmness using air pressure to help you sleep better. It also includes gizmos to preheat your side of the bed so it’s warm enough for you to fall asleep and can raise one partner’s head to prevent snoring.

Nokia Sleep

This Wi-Fi sleep gizmo slots underneath your mattress and tracks sleep cycles, heart rate and snoring using sensors. You can also set up the sensor to control other smart home gadgets via the ‘If This Then That’ service (IFTTT). As the name suggests, this service syncs devices and makes them respond to things you do with other devices. For example, when you get into bed, this alerts the lights and heating to switch off. The accompanying app offers advice on how to sleep better, and you can ask Alexa for updates via Amazon Echo smart speakers.