Sense sleep tracker: my impressions after 7 weeks

Sense is a smart device to help us to have sleep better. It 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 and we need to clip it on our pillow so it can detects our sleep movements.

I wrote my first impression on this product back in May 2015 in this separate post.
Then I wrote another post with better review after using it for one week. If you have not, I suggest you read these previous two posts before continuing this one.

Now, since I have reviewed most of Sense’s features back in June, this post will start with one feature I have not used when I wrote my previous post: Smart Alarm. According to Sense app Smart Alarm will wake us up at the lightest part of our natural sleep cycle, up to 30 minutes before the requested wake up time, making sure we wake up refreshed and at the right time. In short, this alarm will not ring exactly at the time we specified, but will use some sort of “smart” analysis of our sleep and might decide to ring as early as 30 minutes before, or exactly on the minute we specified, or some time in between.

I generally do not have issue with waking up in the morning. But I did have some bad morning when I felt uncomfortable right after waking up hearing alarm sound. This usually gave me few bad hours in the morning before I eventually recovered and picked up the rest of the day just fine. Two weeks ago, I finally got curious about if Smart Alarm feature can eliminate this “bad morning” experience. Theoretically it should, because it will try its best not to wake me up when my sleep cycle is in a deep phase. No one likes to be disturbed at the nicest part of their sleep anyway.

So I set this Smart Alarm from Sense app and turned off my conventional alarm from my Sony alarm clock. We can choose different sound for the alarm. Strangely, previewing these sound in my iPhone took a while. I guess the app must download the sound from the Sense unit every-time I pressed the play button. They could do better in this. Since the sound choices are not that many, they can easily include the sounds into their app compilation.

My first morning with the Smart Alarm was a complete failure. I did not wake up, at all. Luckily, my wife woke me up. The sound that I choose was too soft.

Then I experimented with all sound choices. I think most of them will not do the job to wake me up. After some testings, I discovered that “Milky Way” sound is good enough to wake me up. Just 1 out of 15 options. After using this sound, I wake up just fine every morning.

After about a week of usage, I have to admit that I do wake up feeling more refreshed. So I consider this feature as a good one. I no longer have bad morning, at least none so far. Probably a bit too early to say, but certainly a good start.

Next, I would like to update my previous review about Sense’s algorithm to automatically detect sleep. In my first week of usage, it made a lot of wrong detections. Apparently after using it more, somehow it got better. It still makes occasional mistakes from time to time, especially when I did some light activities before sleeping (like reading books or playing with my baby boy). However, my overall impression of its accuracy is improving. Perhaps it starts to learn my sleep pattern better and no longer be tricked by accidental pillow movements during daytime. Or perhaps they don’t actually improve the algorithm and I simply became more accustomed to it and simply built higher tolerance.

The connection bug with Apple’s Health app is still exist until today. Sometimes it delivers the data just fine to Apple’s Health, some other times it just deliver nothing. An app update that is supposed to fix this problem did not quite deliver. It is still buggy.

Overall, I still have mixed feeling with this product. The design is really beautiful and I love seeing it in my bedroom. The colorful light effect is awesome. The sleep detection is getting better, even though it still makes mistakes from time to time. The sleep score is kinda pointless to me. It does not represent how good (or how bad) I feel about previous night’s sleep. Sometimes, a night with poor sleep got me unbelievably good score, and vice versa. The Smart Alarm feature works great. The connection to Apple’s Health is still really buggy. Again, most of the issues are software issues and supposedly can be fixed with an update. I just wish they can deliver the fixes a lot faster.