Human beings spend approximately one third of their life sleeping. I personally believe that a good sleep is an important key for a productive day. It is also super important for our health. That is why I bought Fitbit One with sleep tracking capability last year and it did help me to understand my sleep a little bit better. When I read about an interesting project in Kickstarter about sleep tracker product that promises to do so much more, I was really happy and went to support the project immediately. That project is Sense, a sleep tracker product by Hello.
Sense is a set of two items. The first component is a ball-shaped sensor that tracks our bedroom’s noise level, ambient light, temperature, humidity and particulate sensors. It also have a built-in speaker for the smart alarm feature. The second component is a tiny movement sensor called Sleep Pill (because it does look like a pill) and we need to clip it on our pillow so it can detects our sleep movements.
After months of waiting, finally I received my Sense three days ago. So here’s my first impression about this product.
Unboxing
Sense comes in a very unique white cylinder-shaped packaging. I am very impressed with the packaging. The process of unboxing this product was delightful. It feels like the excitement of unboxing Apple products several years ago. Apple products no longer give me the same level of excitement in the last few years because the unboxing experience has become rather plain.
When I opened the packaging cover, the ball-shaped Sense appears very beautifully as the center of attention. In the second layer lies a wall charger, USB cable and the Sleep Pill. I am glad that they took the extra mile by giving me wall charger with AU plug. The USB cable looks nice. The sleep pill is a bit thicker than what I initially imagined, but it is very well-built. Overall, I was very impressed with the build quality.
Initial Setting
Setting up Sense was easy. All I needed to do was downloading the Sense app into my iPhone, and it showed step by step guide to make sure that everyone can do initial setting without an issue. Basically, our phone needs to connect to Sense unit via Bluetooth. Then using the Bluetooth connection we tell the Sense unit about our Wifi network so it can connect to Wifi by itself. Next we pair our Sleep Pill. I only got the Bluetooth connection popup dialog appeared for the Sense unit, so I suspect the Sleep Pill is connected to Sense unit, not to our phone.
One thing really worth to mention here is how beautiful the Sense unit is. I put it near my bed and it looks stunning. In the pairing process with our phone it glows purple. After the initial setting is completed, it will glow green, yellow or red when we put our hand on top of it. Green indicates that everything in our bedroom is good for ideal sleeping condition. Yellow means there are non-ideal components. Red means it’s not a good environment to sleep.
Sense App
I like the design of Sense app. It’s light and simple. Every morning we will receive a “score” of our sleep, from 1 to 100. So far I got 75 and 72 for two nights that I consider as not a good sleeping nights. The app shows our “activities” during our sleep, including when we fell asleep, when we have light sleep / medium sleep / deep sleep, when we did some tossing and turning. Since I ordered an extra Sleep Pill unit for my wife, each of us gets separate sleeping analysis, plus the sleeping analysis shows when both my wife and I moved around during our sleep.
There is no button that I need to press before I go to sleep. Sleep Pill unit is attached to my pillow and automatically detects when we go to sleep. I find its prediction not always accurate. In the first night of test, it detected that I started my sleeping during the time I moved my pillow a little bit, the go out of bedroom and did not start sleeping until 2 hours later. As a result, Sense detected that I had good deep sleep during that 2 hours because I did not move. Well, of course my pillow did not move. That was because I was not even in the bedroom.
Temporary conclusion
So far, I like Sense and I think it could be useful to help me sleep better. I have just started using it for 2 nights and it is too early to make any conclusion. However, I can at least say that it looks awesomely good in my bedroom. I haven’t tried its “smart alarm” because having a baby sleeping in the same room means I need to keep the baby sleeping unless it’s feeding time. So, I can’t afford having a “smart alarm” sound successfully wake me up, together with my wife, and our baby.
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