What you need to know
- Amazon has unveiled a machine learning-powered bedside sleep tracker called Halo Rise.
- The sleep tracker analyzes your sleep by sensing movement and respiratory patterns with a non-contact sensor system.
- The Alexa-enabled sleep tracker also doubles as an alarm clock by playing your favorite song.
Amazon's Halo line of wellness devices typically requires you to wear a smart band for a wide range of functions, including sleep tracking. This is changing soon, as the company has devised another way of tracking your sleep that does not require you to wear a piece of technology on your wrist.
During its Devices & Services event today, Amazon introduced the Halo Rise, a machine learning-powered sleep tracker that sits on your bedside table and doubles as an alarm clock. The new device expands Amazon's wellness offerings, which came to life with the launch of the Halo View fitness tracker in 2020. The Halo Rise will retail for $140 and will start shipping later this year.
The new bedside sleep tracker ditches the usual cameras or microphones. Instead, it uses a no-contact sensor technology to detect your sleep stages, aided by movements and breathing patterns. It also measures the environment of a bedroom in order to identify factors that may interfere with your sleep. Halo Rise then uses machine learning to analyze that data and display personalized sleep insights on its companion app.
According to Amazon, the Halo Rise's sleep algorithm was trained and validated against polysomnography, a clinical standard used for sleep analysis. Amazon says these algorithms were developed using "a large clinical dataset looking for patterns in the breathing and how that matches up to sleep state."
These insights are then displayed on a Rem graph, which shows light and deep sleep as well as information on the ambient room temperature, humidity, and light in the room. The ultimate goal is to help customers understand and improve their sleep.
"With Halo Rise, there are no apps to activate, nothing to wear on your wrist, no batteries to worry about—just get into bed and you’re good to go," Amazon's Njenga Kariuki said during the virtual event.
The Halo Rise also works with Alexa, allowing it to function as an alarm clock by playing your favorite song. You can also use many of Amazon's best Alexa devices to ask the digital assistant about your sleep quality. In addition, you can program Alexa to do things like dim the lights before bedtime.
The sleep tracker comes with six months of Halo membership, which gives you access to additional wellness resources.
If you want a better understanding of your sleep, Amazon's Halo Rise can do just that thanks to its no-contact sensor technology. It features a gentle light and can even wake you up to your favorite song.
