BETTER HEALTH STARTS AT HOME

Advances in sensors that tell us more about, well, us, mean that people can take their health and wellbeing into their own hands more than ever before. And although you might associate health tech with activity trackers or specialist medical devices, there’s potential for it to become a staple in your new smart home, too.

The first smart product that might one day become just as important as your kettle is a sleep tracker. Many of us know that the amount of shut-eye we get has a direct impact on our health and wellbeing, which is why many of the fitness tech companies, like Fitbit, are channelling their efforts into advanced sleep-sensing tech.

A number of sleep sensors that sit on your bed or are incorporated into your bedding already exist, like the Zeeq Smart Pillow or Beddit sensor. But having tech tucked up in bed with you, no matter how small, isn’t ideal. That’s why there’s now a move to keep tech smarts that live on your bed to a minimum, with devices such as the S+ Sleep Monitor from Resmed analysing your body movements as you sleep instead.

Sleep tech becomes even more useful when it doesn’t just track your sleep but improves it. That’s why wake-up lights from Lumie and Sleepace are already popular, the optimal sound and lighting experience to lull you into dreamland.

However, it’s not just sleep that your smart home wants to monitor but the environment, too. The Netatmo Healthy Home Coach can keep tabs on humidity, temperature, air quality and noise, then recommend how you can create a more optimal environment in which to live.

As air pollution reaches an all-time high, environment-sensing is becoming more important than ever, also have specific applications, like if one family has asthma or allergies.

Sure, weighing scales aren’t new, but now your old scales with a dial that would give you unpredictable results are a thing of the past. Smart scales, like the latest device from QardioBase, can now track body fat, water, BMI, muscle mass, bone composition, and in some cases even pregnancy.

As you’d expect, all of this data can then be sent to your smartphone and sync up with other apps to paint a more holistic picture of your overall health. But our smart homes don’t need to do all the tracking and sensing to make us healthier. Systems that use the data we already have from wearables like Fitbit and Misfit to make changes in the smart home could be life-changing.

Let’s imagine your Fitbit senses your heart rate is high so it adjusts the lights and sounds in your home accordingly in an attempt to de-stress you. While smart homes don’t work as seamlessly as that right now, they are not that far away from doing so.

The smart home tech that ends up succeeding in the wellness and health space will be the tech that does something about our problems rather than just sensing them. For example, being notified that the air is of a poor quality today is one thing. But turning on your air purifier, opening windows and making tweaks to the home with the help of other devices is when it’ll become useful and invaluable in the not-so-distant future.