Technology and sleep: a match made in heaven?

tabletIt’s funny, because we’ve spent a lot of time lately talking about how technology is messing with our sleep — how those ubiquitous smart phones and tablets are making their way into the bedroom and keeping us up with their melatonin-suppressing blue light.

But suddenly, technology and sleep are walking hand-in-hand, and technology may be sleep’s new best friend.

For Christmas, I bought my husband a FitBit — one of those little rubber bracelets that keeps up with how many steps you walk each day, and tracks your goals automatically as it synchs with your smart phone. In one sense, it’s a glorified pedometer (and I’m dying to borrow it for Market, just to see exactly how many miles we cover from showroom to showroom), but it’s also so much more.

You wear it day in, day out — you can shower with it, and you’re meant to sleep with it. In fact, it measures your sleep each night, and gives you a personalized report on how long — and how well — you slept.

It was this feature, as much as the encouragement to exercise, that cinched the deal for me when I purchased it. My husband, a notorious night owl who often gets sucked into video games late into the night, has not spent much time thinking about his sleep until now.

But techno-geek that he is, having it monitored and put into report form every night has piqued his interest — he’s more focused on his quality and quantity of sleep than he’s ever been before.

Right now the FitBit (and there are others on the market like it) is just a fun fitness gadget that retails for around $100. But as these things become more widely available, I’ll bet we have a ripple effect of more consumers thinking about — and caring about — getting a good night’s sleep than ever before.

A new Gallup poll reports that 40% of Americans get less sleep than is recommended. If that 40% suddenly starts caring more about their sleep, and paying more attention to the quality of sleep, that changes the world in which we operate.

Last month, Select Comfort launched its Sleep Number x12 at the Consumer Electronics Show to rave reviews, several awards and a slew of media attention. Touted by the company as the most technologically advanced bed in the world, it uses proprietary SleepIQ technology to provide sleepers with individualized comfort, monitoring breathing, movement and heart rate — and ultimately, generating a SleepIQ score for each partner, every night.

This combination of technology and personalization makes sense, and I’m sure will continue to influence our industry in the years to come. Technology makes things new and exciting and — let’s face it — downright sexy. It changes things from being need-based to being want-based, and if we’re lucky, in our industry, the two intersect. And personalization, too, sells. Anything that makes things more tailored just to you is exciting.

In one of my favorite stories in BedTimes this month, Los Angeles fashion photographer Chris Fitzgerald is inspired to photograph abandoned mattresses on L.A.’s streets, and one of the things that first inspired him was his thoughts about what intimate things mattresses are, and how it seemed wrong to discard them so easily.

“Not to anthropomorphize too much, but mattresses know so much about us,” he said.

They are very personal, these “white rectangles” that we all have a hand in producing — we spend years with them, we toss and turn and worry on them, we spend intimate time with our partners in their midst, and we sleep, vulnerable and in the depths of our subconscious, hopefully for seven to nine hours each night. Why shouldn’t they become more personal? Why shouldn’t they know even more about us?

Technology is changing our world in myriad ways — we all know this. But the way it’s changing our world — our world of sleep and sleep products — is potentially game-changing. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

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