Building on existing sleep track systems that place a sensor on top of the mattress, two new patent applications from Apple show that the company is researching how to get more data and do so more comfortably.
Apple’s Beddit Sleep Monitor automatically tracks your sleep and works with the Beddit app on your iPhone to help measure, manage, and improve your sleep. The sensor strip is extremely thin, flat, and soft (2 millimeters thin). With automatic and accurate tracking, you get a full picture of your night by measuring sleep time, heart rate, breathing, snoring, and bedroom temperature and humidity. And when you set daily bedtime and sleep time goals, Beddit motivates you to achieve them with tip notifications like morning results, bedtime reminders, and weekly reports.
William Gallagher for AppleInsider:
“Layered Sensor Having Multiple Laterally Adjacent Substrates in a Single Layer,” one of the two new patent applications, is concerned with adding many sensors without adding bulk to the device… The devices described in this application are similar to the Beddit Sleep Monitor that Apple currently sells. The Apple Store describes it as a “sensor strip,” and it is meant to lie across a bed at approximately where the sleeper’s chest is.
Apple says this model is already “extremely thin, flat, and soft,” but presumably it isn’t slim enough. The patent application wants to keep this form factor but add “multiple types of sensing mechanisms in a single device.”
At the same time, a second patent application has now been revealed, and this one is credited primarily to Henry Rimmine… who was Beddit’s chief hardware inventor before he left Apple in December 2019. This patent application again describes a Beddit Sleep Monitor-style device — although in a couple of different configurations. It is concerned with creating “a sensor stack,” plus circuitry to convert analog signals, such as body vibrations, into digital data.
MacDailyNews Take: The thinner Apple can make sleep tracking, the better.