The Pod is a smart bed that doesn't just monitor your sleep – it actually makes it more restful. The mattress dynamically adjusts its temperature to make sure you're comfortable all night, and each side can heat and cool itself independently so you don't end up fighting with your partner over the covers.
People understand that nutrition and fitness is not enough for your health – sleep is just as important, and they need to start taking care of it
Matteo Franceschetti, Eight Sleep
It's the latest device from Eight Sleep – a company that wants to use technology to control every possible factor that can affect the quality of your slumber.
"I was a typical entrepreneur, super stressed out, working almost 24/7, and my sleep was suffering at the time," Eight Sleep's CEO Matteo Franceschetti tells TechRadar.
"I started wondering why we have self-driving cars and space travel going to Mars, but we still spend one third of our lives on traditional beds that don’t leverage technology to improve my health."
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Rather than just lying awake worrying, Franceschetti began investigating ways to embed technology into a bed, letting people monitor their sleep without the need to wear a watch or change any of their habits.
"The reason is that if it’s right there, and you use it every day," he says, "and that’s the time for your body to really recharge and recover."
Sleep for health
Franceschetti believes there are three 'pillars' of health – diet, nutrition and sleep –and the latter has only recently started getting the attention is deserves. Sleep tracking is now a standard feature for sports watches that once only monitored steps and distance, and there's a growing selection of devices that slip under your mattress and gather data throughout the night.
Franceschetti compares this surge in interest to the rise of fitness in the 1990s.
"People started to train and started working out and going to the gym," he says. "There was a big movement about the importance of exercise for your health, and that applied also to nutrition, but it wasn't applied to sleep. Sleep is something that just started, I would say, three to five years ago. People understand that nutrition and fitness is not enough for your health – sleep is just as important, and they need to start taking care of it.
Just tracking your sleep phases isn't enough, though; you need to do something with that data, and it's not as straightforward as taking more steps or drinking more water throughout the day. Good quality sleep depends on a host of factors that are largely out of our control during the night – and temperature is one of the biggest.
Warm or cool
If you find yourself throwing the covers off in the middle of the night to cool down, or curling into a ball to get warm – possibly to the annoyance of your partner? You're not alone. According to Franceschetti, 43% of couples argue about the temperature when they're trying to sleep.
"The Pod brings us one step closer to our vision of adjusting any factor that can affect your sleep performance," he says. "Temperature is the biggest, so that’s why we decided to tackle that first."
Ultimately, Eight Sleep hopes to control every factor that affects your ability to sleep well (such as noise, for example), optimizing every night so it's as restful as possible. That's the dream, anyway.
