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This gorgeous little ball has changed how I sleep - here's how it works
This gorgeous little ball has changed how I sleep - here's how it works
Jul 26, 2021, 12:45 IST
Made by a San Francisco startup called Hello, Sense is simple to set up and use.
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Sense sits right next to your bed, either on the floor or on a nightstand, and stays plugged into an outlet at all times.
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To monitor your movement during the night, Sense also comes with a tiny Sleep Pill, a button the size of the quarter that clips onto the end of your pillow.
The Sleep Pill doesn’t need to be recharged. It has a replaceable battery that lasts a full year.
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Sense also works with two Sleep Pills, in case your partner wants to learn more about their sleep patterns. Having two pills also makes each one more accurate.
When you turn off the lights and go to bed, you’ll see your Sense light up in one of three colors. Red means the conditions are poor for sleeping, green means the conditions are good, and yellow means it’s not quite right.
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Here, my Sense glowed purple to show it was pairing to my phone and Sleep Pill.
The Sense app can help you learn about the conditions in your room, and what you need to improve. There, you’ll see the current temperature, humidity, air quality, brightness, and noise level in your room.
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Each morning, you’ll be treated to a complete summary of your sleep last night. You can see when the lights went off, when you fell asleep, and any time you were moving around a lot in bed.
The app will also give you a full analysis of your sleep, including total time slept and total time in deep sleep.
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The main number to focus on is your Sleep Score (any number out of 100), which is based on the conditions of the bedroom and how well you slept.
You can even see your Sleep Scores over the past week or month. Here, you can see I slept much better over the weekend.
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You can also see the average amount of time you're sleeping each night, as well as how much of that sleep is in deep sleep, medium sleep, or light sleep.
The app also offers tips to improve your sleep quality, and statistics that compare your personal sleep data to everyone else who uses Sense.
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The goal is to use this knowledge provided by Sense to make adjustments to your habits and environment and improve your Sleep Score.
Since Sense keeps track of your sleep cycles, you can actually program your Sense to wake you up during the lightest part of your sleep cycle to help you feel refreshed.
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These “Smart Alarms” are built right into the app and they play a custom alarm tone up to 30 minutes before your requested wake up time. When the alarm goes off, the Sense ball plays the tone and puts on a small light show. Just wave your hand over the Sense ball to turn off the alarm.
I really dig Sense. It’s pretty to look at and easy to use — the app’s intuitive interface is one particular highlight.
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It’s not perfect: For example, Sense can’t pick up on afternoon naps, though Hello’s CEO James Proud told Tech Insider that’s something they’re looking at for the future. That said, Sense is great at giving you insight into your sleeping habits, and even offers suggestions to improve your sleep. I really appreciate its constructive feedback.
It’s also great to see Sense continually improving. In a recent update, Sense gained the ability to distinguish noise disturbances from actual, full-on wake ups. Proud told us that Hello is very careful with what they add to Sense “because we want to make sure when we tell you something, that we are very certain that is what happened.”
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This level of thoughtfulness is consistent across the full Sense experience, from the design of the physical ball, to the app and its features, to the custom ringtones and “Smart Alarms.” Everything feels carefully curated with no extraneous features floating around.
Sense costs $129 — it comes with one ball (either white or charcoal) and one Sleeping Pill. You can buy one via Hello’s website <a href="https://hello.is/"target="_blank">right here</a>. If you have trouble sleeping, or just want to get better sleep, I recommend giving Sense a shot.