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The new smart home gadgets that will help you sleep better

Getting a good night’s sleep is essential to health, happiness and productivity. Experts recommend we should all get 7-9 hours of kip every night to help keep us at our prime.

Modern life can make nodding off more difficult, with new technology playing a big part in that.Our minds and bodies need time to relax and unwind before shutting down for the night and distractions and glare from bedroom TVs and smartphones can often keep our minds working too late in the evening.

However, technology is fast becoming a great tool to help us get to sleep more quickly, more comfortably and with higher quality of sleep to ensure we can recharge our body’s batteries.

Smart beds

Smart beds sound like they’re straight out of Hollywood science fiction, but they are at the forefront of sleep tech. There’s now a huge range of smart beds, each with their own set of amazing features to help you into a perfect slumber.

The most famous example is Sleep Number’s 360 smart bed which has a number of tricks up its sleeve. Firstly, it can be programmed with custom sleep settings and bedtime routines. So, if you want to be asleep by 11pm, it will remind you to get to bed with enough time to fall asleep. On top of that, the smart bed will make sure it’s nice and toasty when you clamber in with its foot warmer function to heat up the lower parts of the bed.

During the night the smart bed responds to your movements to keep you as comfortable as possible. If you sleep on your side, the bed will sense this and alter its two air chambers in the mattress to match your body’s shape. Similarly, if you or your partner sleep on your backs, the bed will tilt your head upwards (without waking you up) if it senses that one of you are snoring and will reduce the likelihood of you making noises in your sleep.

Better yet, the bed has ‘biometric sensor technology’ built in. This system tracks your heat rate, motion and breathing which are then fed into an algorithm that adjusts the bed to your individual needs and explains the changes in the morning.

The bed is so clever that it will wake you with an alarm at the moment when the system thinks you’re in the lightest part of your sleep cycle, thus ensuring you wake in the best possible way.

Smart duvets

You might wonder how a smart duvet could do much more than a regular duvet. It’s just a bag of fluff, right? Wrong. The smart duvet market is always throwing up incredible ideas just as much as any other tech product.

Firstly, they can help regulate temperature so that you can tailor the warmth of the bed to the exact degree you like – whether that’s hot or cold. Better yet, you can now control each side of the bed separately so if you sleep with a partner that prefers a different temperature, you can each have your ideal temp.

Secondly, smart duvets can actually make themselves once you get up. By inserting an inflatable sheet into the duvet, the duvet will unravel and place itself back into its original position so you don’t have to. Amazing.

Smart pillows

Smart pillows look like regular pillows, but have a wealth of tech built in to help ensure a better night’s sleep.

For example, the Zeeq smart pillow has speakers built in to its memory foam padding to help you drift off while listening to calming sounds, such as rainforests or water. If you want, you can link it to your music streaming service of choice or play an audiobook – whatever helps you relax. Don’t worry, you can set a timer so that the music will turn off on its own once you’re asleep.

On top of that, it has a built in snore alarm. A microphone in the pillow detects snoring and triggers the pillow to gently vibrate, just enough to encourage you to move without waking you up.

It uses that same vibrate function to wake you up in the morning too. The pillow tracks your natural sleep movements and that data is used to wake you up at the ideal moment in your sleep cycle. When setting up the pillow, you can give it a window of time it can do this to ensure it doesn’t wake you up stupidly early or let you lie in past when you need to get up.

Smart lamps

When you wake up in the morning a dark room can make it difficult to get out of bed, while strong sunlight may be too harsh on the eyes. How do you fix that? Well, a smart lamp can give you a smoother start by mimicking the dawn of the day by gradually increasing its brightness and intensity within 30 minutes of waking up.

This means that your eyes can slowly adjust to the day and allows your body time to get into the swing of things.

Most come with a speaker to allow for an audio wake up call too. However, long gone are the harsh alarm clocks. These usually allow you to connect to Spotify or the radio instead.

Smart pyjamas

It may sound crazy that smart pyjamas are a thing, but they are.

One example is the Recovery Sleepwear made by Under Armour. They teamed up with American Football player, Tom Brady, to create a range of smart pyjamas. Brady believes sleep is crucial to his performance and developed the product so that other athletes (and now anyone) can follow suit.

The clothing features a hexagonal infrared pattern on the inside of the shirts and trousers, which helps the body recover more quickly, promotes sleep and reduces inflammation. Using athletic company TB12’s recovery technology, this print is designed to absorb the body’s natural heat and reflects Far Infrared back onto the skin”.

Smart speakers

If you don’t fancy spending a small fortune on sleep technology, you can always plump for a smart speaker instead. Many include features that will help you sleep in similar ways.

For example, you can use the Amazon Echo or Echo Show to help get you off to sleep. If you’ve connected it to your bedroom lights, you can roll into bed and simply ask Alexa (the device’s built-in AI) to turn them off without having to get up again. You can then ask her to play soothing music or an audiobook to help you drift off. In the morning, she can wake you up at your desired time with an alarm, music or soothing sound.