I’m one of the many people who likes to fall asleep while watching TV, which is fine by itself, but the fact that the TV remains on while I’m asleep is not just bad for my health, it wastes a lot of power. That’s where Samsung thinks the SleepSense can be of assistance. One of the many additions to Samsung’s smart home product lineup, the SleepSense is able to detect when you fall asleep and will automatically turn off your TV when you do so. It can also provide you with personalized sleep reports and suggestions on how to improve your sleep. 

In its quest to sell more gizmos in our smartphone-saturated era, Samsung is pushing deep into the so-called ‘smart home’. Earlier today Samsung-owned SmartThings released a new line-up of in-home sensors for its Internet of Things connector hub. Now the mothership has followed up by outing a sleep tracker, called SleepSense, that can also plug into other connected devices you might have around home — such as a smart TV or web-enabled air-con. Why does a sleep sensor need to be able to switch off your TV or tweak your air-con? To help you sleep better, reckons Samsung. The sensor can connect to other Samsung smart appliances (such as its smart TVs), or other non-Samsung connected devices if you have a SmartThings hub to do the bridging — so that it can switch things off or on, or dial things up or down, based on whether you’re falling asleep or about to wake up. The gizmo will also do what more common-or-garden sleep trackers do: analyze your “sleep quantity and quality”, dishing up personalised sleep reports and serving up recommendations on how to improve your sleep via the companion mobile app.