Sleep Tech: How can smart devices improve sleep quality?
Tags: UX Research, User Experience, UX, Design, Technology

Photo by Krista Mangulsone on Unsplash

Since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, it has disrupted many aspects of our lives. Health worries, self-isolation, job loss, school, and economic problems can increase stress, anxiety, and depression. And these things affect your sleep.

Peloton, the “Netflix of fitness”, said its fiscal fourth-quarter sales surged 172%, as its high-tech stationary bike and treadmill became two of the hottest commodities for people looking to work out at home during the coronavirus pandemic. This meant that people’s interest in self-care has increased. In fact, the number of downloads of Mindfulness and Health-related apps increased sharply this year. Interest in sleep is no exception.

In fact, the problem of lack of sleep was a topic of conversation before the pandemic. Lack of sleep is not a life-threatening problem like a virus, but a life-threatening problem if it is allowed to continue. According to the World Sleep Society, sleep problems constitute a global epidemic that threatens health and quality of life for up to 45% of the world’s population. Also, under these circumstances, where viruses are prevalent, the risk of immune degradation from sleep deprivation cannot be ignored.

What is Sleep tech?

Sleep tech is to use technic to help people sleep soundly. The steady growth of the Sleeponomics — a compound word of sleep and economy, as a phenomenon in which the sleeping industry grows as modern people spend much money for a good night’s sleep — market from two to three years ago has proven that many people suffer from sleep disorders. Currently, various sleep-related products such as bed mattresses, pillows, and eye masks are applied with AI, IoT, big data, and health care technologies to accurately identify and analyze sleep conditions.

How is it being used?

When you think about Sleep Tech, it’s easy to think of sleep-inducing music such as ASMR or natural healing sound for insomnia. Of course, this is part of sleep technology. However, no matter how we fall asleep, we can’t know clearly whether our sleep quality was good or bad. Sleep tracking is the key technology for this. A sleep tracker is a device that monitors one or more aspects that reflect your sleep patterns, habits, stages, quality, and/or duration. This measurement is indirect, relying on more easily detectable physical signals of sleep, rather than basing it on brain activity and eye movement as they do in some formal medical tests. Here are some examples for your understanding of how this sleep tracking works.

1. Withings Sleep

Image from Withings Sleep

The Withings Sleep is a non-wearable sleep tracker that collects data on your sleep experience from underneath your mattress. The product’s built-in sensors detect your snoring and apnea as well as heart rate, breathing, and movement. This data is sent to your mobile phone via Wi-Fi so you can check your daily sleep health. Also, you can adjust your bed lighting to temperature by using the interlocking function with a smart home system.

2. Sleep Tracking App(Sleep Monitor, Pillow, etc)

Image from Google Play

There are a lot of sleep tracker apps on Google Play and the App Store. It is an app that tracks your sleep cycle and analyses it. You can mark your daily habits that could affect your sleep before you start the sleep tracker mode. So you can guess what were the sleep factors. Also, they record sleep noise while you sleep so that can help you to realize which sleep disorders you have.

2. Smartwatch(Fitbit, Apple Watch)

Image from Amazon

There are a variety of wearable devices that effectively help with sleep tracking, but the smartwatch is a popular device among them. It can track your sleep pattern to estimate how much time you’ve spent asleep, awake, and restless. You can also look at your average hours slept, sleep score, sleep schedule, and sleep stages to see how these change over time. So, If you use your wearable devices like a smartwatch with your sleep apps, it can be useful for analyzing your sleep.

The Challenges of Sleep Tech

These various sleep tech products are pouring out, but on the other hand, they have limitations. Since I was interested in Sleep Tech, I downloaded various sleep-related apps and used them for a month. I found out that there were some common problems. To investigate these problems, I analyzed reviews from existing users. I also recommended these apps to others and analyzed their usability.

My research: sleep track app’s pros&cons, user interviews, affinity maps, mind map...

As a result of user interviews and research, I found the following facts.

They only show sleep data analysis, there are no suggestions on how to improve sleep quality. Some apps have too many functions, so the screen is complicated. For this reason, users need to learn how to use the app rather than just using it intuitively.

How can we solve these problems as a UX design?

As a young UX designer, I thought deeply about these problems. Through the HMW question, I came up with the following ideas.

How might we improve people’s sleep quality using their sleep data?

How about using a smart home system? It can control the right temperature, humidity, and lighting so that users can sleep comfortably. Also, it can turn on the lights slowly on the user’s alarm time to avoid the stress from a loud alarm.

2. How might we place many functions on the screen easily?

Why don’t we use the voice interface as an assistant instead of the complicated screen? Of course, voice assistant technology is not yet outstanding enough to satisfy users, but there is no better solution than to replace complex screens when talking about future possibilities.