Smart Homes Adapt, Wearables Just Track. We Should Expect More

A few weeks ago I came across this article on The Verge about the Ultrahuman Home Monitor. In the article, the author points out "We should note that the Ultrahuman Home won’t actually address the concerns it detects."

What struck me about that comment is that it seems odd to the author that the home monitor is just that, a monitor. Yet, everyday people are tracking their health and sleep with trackers and nobody, well, aside from us at Affectable, think it's strange that we're just tracking a bunch of data, but beyond some pretty graphs and some numbers, that many users don't even understand, the devices don't address any of the concerns it detects.

The very next day, I came across this article from Android Police about the new Samsung wearable ring, and I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the feature which adjusts your air conditioning based on data from the ring. Though I'm not sure how effective this will be, as I'm not sure room temperature adapts quickly enough to your body's needs, but it could learn over time what you need, and then adapt on a schedule accordingly.

The point is, almost nobody is talking about this feature which is FINALLY taking the device that most people think is all about gathering stats, and turning it into a device that is actively altering your environment to improve sleep.

It’s no surprise that sleep trackers have become so common. The availability of inexpensive components has made it easy to throw sensors into a wearable device and show some data in an app. But just because it is cheap to collect sleep data does not mean the data itself is valuable, or useful to the person wearing the device.

We have written before about what sleep trackers get wrong about sleep. One of the biggest risks is something called orthosomnia, where people make their sleep worse by just trying to chase a higher score on their sleep tracker.

It is encouraging to see Samsung move beyond tracking to actively adjusting your sleep environment. It shows that the industry is starting to recognize that measurement alone is not enough.

After getting a sleep tracker, and looking at my scores night after night, I realized that having more data wasn't helping me. Even before I understood that measuring sleep by time is not a valuable metric, it was even more obvious to that we shouldn't just be tracking our health, we are on the cusp of having the technology for our wearables to directly intervene and interact with our environment and our physiology to improve our health and wellbeing.

It sounds crazy to think we'd put something in our house that would measure the  health of our environment but not change it, why does doing the same thing to our physiology not seem equally outrageous?

It's why we called our company Affectable, next generation wearables go beyond just measuring our biomarkers to actively altering our physiology, biology, or neurology on our behalf. They are wearables that affect our health. Affectables.

At Affectable, we believe this is just the start, for the last 5 years we've been developing technology to directly enhance the restorative function of sleep, not just measure how long you've slept.

Our headband monitors your brain activity in real-time and our patent-pending auditory stimulation enhances the restorative function of sleep, without altering sleep time. We’re not giving you stats on how long you slept, we’re taking action while you sleep, so you get the most benefit out of every minute.

Join on our waitlist and you’ll get the first to get the opportunity to purchase our Affectable Sleep headband, and will get some early sneak peaks at what we've been building.

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