This Could SERIOUSLY Improve Your Sleep (& Your Life)

Sleep can be elusive, but it's also one of few things that can make a huge improvement in your overall personal well-being. Dozens of fitness and activity trackers capitalize on that potential, giving you unprecedented insight into your ZZZs. And now, Samsung is entering the fray with a gadget that aims to not only improve your sleep, but also to ease your morning and evening routines. SleepSense is a disc-shaped device you place underneath your mattress to track your heart rate and movement, giving you a summary of your nightly sleep patterns. To make things easy to understand, its mobile app assigns you a numerical sleep score that takes into account how often you woke up, the amount of time you spent in REM sleep, and your sleep efficiency, among other factors. Based on your score, the app can give you advice on how to improve. For the morning, the app has an alarm feature that goes off when you're at a more amenable point in your sleep cycle, to avoid disrupting a quality REM session. Then again, that's what nearly all sleep trackers do these days. SleepSense goes one interesting step further: Seeing as Samsung produces all sorts of connected devices, from smartphones to home appliances, SleepSense can also connect to those smart devices so they turn off or on automatically, based on when you fall asleep or wake up. So, you wouldn't need to switch on the coffee maker in the morning, or set it to start at a specific time; if you sleep in, the coffee won't start brewing until you actually start stirring. You can use your sleep patterns to control everything from thermostats and security cameras to lightbulbs, turning down the temperature or switching off the TV once you start snoozing, or turning on lights in the house once you wake up. SleepSense should go on sale by the end of the year, for a yet-to-be-announced price. We could totally dig living The Jetsons' life — and finally getting a full eight hours of sleep in the process.