Smart bed for kids knows when they’re awake, keeps monsters away
LAS VEGAS — A new smart bed knows when your kids are sleeping and when they’re awake.
This may sound like a helicopter parent‘s dream, but it’s not as creepy as it seems: The bed monitors their snoozing cycles and determines if diet, stress and other daily activities are impacting the quality of their sleep.
Building off of its x12 smart bed for adults, the SleepIQ Kids bed from manufacturer Sleep Number was announced at the 2015 International CES in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Sleep Number is the latest company to unveil a product in the budding smart home category.
The bed, which is equipped with tiny hidden sensors, uses digital-signal capture within the mattress and processing techniques to pick up on motion and pressure. It tracks a child’s breathing and heart-rate throughout the night too, and blends that data with other factors to determine a SleepIQ score in the morning — the higher the number (based from 1 to 100), the better the quality of sleep.
It’s interactive, too. A sleep dashboard (available via an Android app or desktop) shows parents how well each child slept and alerts them in real-time if they need attention and are out of bed. The bed can also tilt if a child wants to read or has a stuffy nose. Meanwhile, soft lights around the bed glow when kids get up or want to read — and parents can turn them off remotely when it gets too late.
The bed is designed to adapt to kids as they get older. Once they hit the age of 10, they’ll be able to manage their own SleepIQ score and see how exercise, sugar and TV time impact how they feel in the morning. This is intended to teach kids how to make better choices throughout the day.
There’s also a personalized bedtime routine checklist that parents and kids can edit, and goals and achievements such as brushing your teeth can be unlocked. Parents receive monthly progress reports to see how sleeping patterns are changing.
While the x12 smart bed for adults, which launched at CES last year, gained a lot of media attention for being perhaps the first true smart bed on the market, there’s a key feature that is only available in the kids version: A monster detector that deciphers when under the bed is clear of even the scariest of bad guys. By hovering a smartphone or tablet in the direction of the bottom of the bed, a small monster icon will appear and determine if the coast is clear (check out the picture above).
SleepIQ Kids, which ships in the U.S. later this year, is priced at about $1,000, according to the company. It will come in twin, full and queen size options.
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