Getting enough sleep plays a massive part in our overall health and wellbeing, and can hugely impact our levels of productivity and performance too. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that many of us struggle to stay on top of at times and with the amount of caffeine and screens consumed on the daily, we might not be getting the most high-quality sleep either.
As much of a bad rap that some tech can get for use before bed (i.e. screens with blue light), there is an amazing selection of tech gadgets that can actually help you sleep better and even wake up more easily too. Sleep is one of those things that can have a huge knock-on effect in virtually every area of our lives, so if there’s a chance to improve our sleep, we should all take it! If this is something you’ve been struggling with, try out some of these tech gadgets to help you sleep better.
Therabody SmartGoggles
Imagine going to bed each night and putting on a large comfy sleep mask to help you get to sleep – it already sounds like a good start, right? Well this one takes it leaps further. The Therabody SmartGoggles also adds vibration, heat, and massage treatments, and has three customizable modes to choose from: Focus, SmartRelax, and Sleep.
It’s the only eye mask that is powered by SmartSense Technology – an exclusive biometric sensor that customizes treatments to lower your heart rate to a more relaxed state. With the aid of this sleep mask, you may experience reduced stress and anxiety, improved sleep quality, headache and eyestrain relief, and more.
When combined with TheraMind via the Therabody app, you can enjoy a multisensory sound therapy experience, exclusively for your SmartGoggles routine. This experience incorporates science-backed audio tracks that can help you stay focused, increase relaxation and fall asleep. With a battery-life of 150-minutes (depending on the mode), it provides the perfect amount of pre-bed therapy to get you on your way to some quality Zzzs.
Mi Bedside Lamp 2
Light can have a powerful effect on the brain and our wellbeing. After all, our brains are programmed to respond to light. Our bodies use it for more than just vision, and amongst these other functions include synchronisation of our biological clock to the 24-hour day and night cycle. When the sun sets, the light gets warmer and wanes, and naturally, we begin to get more tired. This effect can be mimicked using a Mi Bedside Lamp 2.
The Mi Bedside Lamp 2 can fill the whole room with bright soft light and also dim it down when necessary, making it the perfect night light. At its brightest of up to 400 lumens, it can easily light up a typical bedroom. On its lowest brightness of just 2 lumens, it can offer just enough light so that you can see but its dimness is sure to make your eyelids a bit heavier. What makes it even better is that along with the brightness, you can also adjust the colour and colour temperature (1700-5600K) via intuitive touch controls or an app.
With this, you can set the lights to be warmer and dimmer at night (an hour or two before you head to bed) to help your body naturally start to get into sleep mode. Similarly, light can help your body wake up more naturally than sound too. So, you can set the lamp to gradually increase in brightness and towards a cool blue light in the mornings to help you wake up slowly and more alert.
Soundcore Sleep A10 by Anker
If sight and sensation can contribute to a good night's sleep, then sound surely plays a role too. Whether your racing mind requries background noise or music to lull you to sleep, or you're easily disturbed by traffic noise or your partner's snoring, the Souncore by Anker Sleep A10 Noise Masking Earbuds can help. They're designed for either scenario and their tiny and lightweight build ensures total comfort, even if you sleep on your side or move around alot.
Sleep A10 is designed to block out unwanted sounds, creating a peaceful sleep environment. With features like a 4-Point Noise Masking System, these earbuds can help drown out noises and guide you into a deeper, more restful sleep. This combines passive noise cancellation, along with soothing sleep sounds to mask disruptive noises. Smart noise masking will track and automatically adjust the volume of these sounds to ensure your surroundings don't disturb you.
If you prefer to listen to music, audiobooks, or guided meditations as you drift off to sleep, you can do so with Sleep A10 too! Connect to Sleep A10 via Bluetooth to listen to relaxation apps, music, and more, for a virtually unlimited selection. Beyond noise control, Sleep A10 also tracks your sleep patterns and provides detailed reports to help you understand your sleep quality. Plus, the personal alarm ensures a gentle wake-up.
Mi Smart Band 8
There are a number of ways a fitness tracker such as the Mi Smart Band 8 can help to improve your sleep. Eating healthier and exercising can certainly impact our quality of sleep and fitness trackers are known to encourage that. Our main reason for adding this to the list however, is due to its sleep monitoring functionalities.
The Mi Smart Band 8 monitors your sleep patterns as you snooze, making note of details regarding deep sleep, light sleep and REM (advanced sleep monitoring will need to be turned on via the Mi Fitness app to use this feature). This data can offer insight into how restful your sleep is and what stage of your sleep cycle you tend to wake up in amongst other things. Using this information, you can adjust your bed time and wakeup time to work with your sleep cycle in a more optimal way.
What’s great about the Mi Smart Band 8 is that it has a whopping up to 16-day battery life making it perfect to use as a daily sleep tracker. As an entry-level fitness tracker, its sleep monitoring functionalities may be quite minimal compared to others so if you’re super serious about monitoring your sleep, it might be worth checking out some other options. You can see some of our other favourites in our Top Fitness Trackers article. Smart watches also offer great sleep monitoring capabilities but keep in mind that they tend to have shorter battery lives.
Xiaomi Blue Light Glasses
The big baddie when it comes to tech and sleep is… blue light. And unfortunately (for our sleep), it’s something that we are constantly exposing ourselves to. Whether it’s watching Netflix, YouTube, checking work emails, or scrolling through social media – the blue light on these screens can be detrimental to our sleep in the late hours of the evening. This is because blue light throws off our circadian rhythm and stimulates the part of our brain that makes us feel alert, elevating our body temperature and heart rate. Even if you can sleep after exposing yourself to blue light, chances are the quality of your sleep isn’t as great.
For the best sleep, it is recommended that we limit our exposure to blue light two to three hours before bed. The simplest way to do this is to simply turn off our devices all together but this is easier said than done. As a stepping stone, you can make use of the ‘night mode’ setting on your devices where the screen will become a yellow light instead of blue. Otherwise, we recommend picking up a pair of Xiaomi Anti-Blue Ray Glasses. These will block out up to 80% of blue light, helping you to sleep better at night and reducing eye fatigue during the day.
Smart Assistant
Smart assistants can be super handy if you’re serious about improving your sleep and waking up easier. There are a number of functions that you can use to enhance your sleep routines, many of which go great with some of the solutions we’ve already mentioned in this post. You can use your smart assistant to set a light schedule (with your Mi Bedside Lamp or other smart lights), set an alarm with gentle sounds to wake you up, play white noise in the background, play a guided sleep meditation, and more!
One of our favourite benefits is that you can do all of this without exposing yourself to blue light so close to bed time. If you don’t already have a bunch of schedules and timers set, you can use a simple voice command to keep your routine on point such as, ‘Hey Alexa, wake me up at 6AM!’. Amazon’s Echo Spot is a sleek smart alarm clock with Alexa and big vibrant sound. It's designed to help you wake up, wind down, and so much more.
Need to catch up on some sleep? Give one or more of these solutions a try and let us know how it goes for you! As you can see, it seems that smart gadgets seem to come in quite handy in helping us improve many areas of our lives. Head over to our Smart Home department to see what other cool gadgets can enhance your life.
