Health and wellness have become hotbeds for innovations. Apple’s ambitions to become a leader in digital healthcare and fitness-tracking transcends the prowess of the Apple Watch. With the acquisition of Beddit last year, the company has shown its interest in the sleep tracking domain. Despite buying Beddit almost an year ago, Apple hasn’t offered its own Apple Watch sleep tracking yet. One indication of Apple’s growing ambitions regarding this is its recent patent application suggesting that the company has some sort of new sleep tracker tech on the way.
The patent application relates to a monitoring system capable of measuring a plurality of vital signs. The technology would be used to track sleep and then based on the analysis, provide feedback to the user on how to improve it. The system is also capable of adjusting the environmental conditions based on the monitored data – all without the need of attaching or wearing any devices by the users themselves.
The system utilizes a mat capable to be placed along with a bed. The mat includes plurality of sensors to monitor the user’s sleep. The system can correlate disruption of a user’s sleep to one or more room conditions (e.g., room temperature, ambient lights, and environmental sounds). The correlation can be used to adjust the temperature of the room through the control system and/or adjust the temperature of the local ambient through active heating or cooling of the mat. In another example, the monitoring system can include one or more actuators, in the mat or in communication with the mat, which can be configured to wake up one or more users based on the user’s sleep state, duration of sleep, and time of day.
Moreover, it also has the ability to monitor more than one users by dynamically partitioning the system into multiple sections to account for multiple users. Each section can be tailored to the corresponding user with independent control and independent measurements to provide separate sleep analysis unique to the user. The monitoring system can also utilize the information from one user in its assessment of the sleep of another user.