What Is a Smart Bed, and Do You Need One?

Smart technology encompasses almost every aspect of our lives, from the workplace, to the living room, kitchen, dining room, and even the bedroom. If you love hanging out in your bed and just never want to leave, then you need to check out a smart bed.

Not only does it come with great smart features for the ultimate in comfort, but it also practically guarantees you’ll have a good time. Will this be yet another smart device that you have no need for? Let’s check it out.

What Is a Smart Bed?

A smart bed is one that uses various technologies such as sensors to gather data about your sleep and self-adjusts using this information to improve your sleep.

It can be described as the ultimate lazy life compared to the boring existing “dumb” bed you have that requires much physical activity, because of its stylish and customizable design.

Some smart beds come with mobile apps that deliver information about your sleep straight to your smartphone, so you can see how well you sleep, plus get suggestions on how you can sleep even better.

However, not all smart beds focus on sleep improvement. Some are just designed to deliver a more enjoyable experience while you’re in bed. For instance, some smart beds have built-in screens or TVs, alarms, built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, smart bed sheets that adjust to temperature changes, and much more.

How Smart Bed Technology Works

Unlike previous generations of beds, smart beds have technology that can revolutionize our sleep styles and patterns.

A smart bed is capable of analyzing your sleep patterns and offering tips on how to optimize your sleep. It goes further to actively carry out functions that are useful to improving your sleep and even communicates with smart devices around the home like smart lights, to switch them on or off.

There are a wide range of “smart” beds, but there’s no comprehensive list of corresponding smart bed features to accommodate all of them. Similarly, technology has evolved with the prevalence of Wi-Fi connectivity and IoT, such that it’s easier to perform simple tasks like adjusting the bed’s position or switching on the heating and cooling system in your home.

Smart beds can track your sleep activity and deliver a report of the same, but it goes further to give you sleep optimization tips so you can make improvements and rest better at night.

Newer smart bed models do even more – they help you sleep better by offering features such as:

• Temperature control: instead of using bandaids like a heated blanket or hot water bottle, some smart beds have a native thermostat that allows you to regulate the mattress temperature while you sleep. If it’s too hot, you’ll be sweating all night, or if it’s too cold, you’ll spend hours on end shivering under the covers waiting for sleep to consume you.
• Position control: this feature allows you to physically move a part of the mattress that you’d like adjusted while the rest remain flat.
• Air chambers: these are inflated air tubes within the mattress that can be controlled via the smart bed’s app and whose pressure sensors adjust to your body posture as you sleep.
• App integration: some smart beds integrate with other smart home appliances to control them by connecting seamlessly to the Internet of Things. This way, you won’t have to get out of bed to switch your thermostat, coffee maker, or smart lights on and off.
• Automatic self-making: this is perhaps one of the highlights of a smart bed. Some are self-making such that you won’t need to make the bed every time you get up in the morning. It uses metal rails connected to the bedsheets to smooth and stretch them over the smart mattress.

Other features include invisible speakers to play ambient music, under-bed ambient lighting that you can use at night when you need to use the bathroom, and wake up lighting that wakes you up slowly and naturally compared to your nasty alarms.

Some come with an adjustable head and foot rest, privacy blinds, or even a home theater screen that’s at the foot of the bed so you can watch movies if you can’t get sleep immediately or just want a cozy spot to enjoy your favorite flicks.

You can also find a smart bed with a retractable workstation that helps if you’re on bedrest but still need to get some work done.

Do You Need a Smart Bed?

The answer to this depends on your needs and budget. For most people, a normal bed is probably enough as long as the mattress is durable, comfortable, user-friendly, lightweight and affordable.

Plus, you can still get some features that smart beds come with like sleep apps, a heated blanket for temperature control, wake-up lights, an affordable projector to beam your movies to the foot of your bed, and more.

If you’re willing to spend some extra bucks and have specific reasons for getting a smart bed, though, go for it. Keep in mind that some smart beds need consistent Internet connection for them to work properly.

Technology doesn’t necessarily make every single product truly useful or better. The same goes for beds, which haven’t required any smart technology or buttons for ages.

The smart bed sounds promising, though the industry is still in its infancy phase, so there’s really no clear-cut narrative as to what it should or shouldn’t do.

There are smart hospital beds, too, which track the patient through a remote monitoring system. They also have sensors for blood, heartbeat, pressure, oxygen, and body temperature among other signals necessary for doctors to monitor patients’ health.

In such cases, smart beds offer an effective solution for healthcare providers and are instrumental in predicting, detecting and preventing unscheduled bed exits. This market is also emerging but is expected to create a huge impact with commercialization.

Whether it works for you or not is a matter of researching to find out which smart bed and smart bedding work best for you.