Amazon has announced the Halo Rise, a bedside device meant to track your sleep and wake you up in the morning using lights and a “small alarm speaker,” as a press release describes it. The company says the Rise uses “contactless” technology, meaning you don’t have to put on something like a fitness tracker or smartwatch for it to work.
The company says that “it doesn’t have any cameras or microphones” but that it tracks movement and your breathing patterns using “built-in sensor technology.” (The company hasn’t described exactly how this works yet, but it seems plausible that it’s using something similar to the ultrasound tech found in some Echo devices.) If you sleep with a partner, Amazon says it should be able to pick out your breathing from theirs, as long as you’re the one closest to the Rise.
It also has built-in environmental sensors to gather data on things like your room’s ambient light level, humidity, and temperature. In the morning, it’ll give you a report about how well you slept. It also takes where you are in your sleep cycle into account when deciding when to wake you up — if you’re deep in slumber, it may try to wait until you’ve come out of that cycle to start simulating a sunrise. (Figuring out what stage of sleep someone is in is hard, though, and devices like wearables haven’t been able to do it reliably).
Of course, the Rise also integrates with Alexa; Amazon says you’ll be able to ask an Echo how you slept, and it’ll base its answer on data gathered by the Rise, and it’ll also be able to detect when you get into bed and run a goodnight Routine. You can also “sync Alexa with the Halo Rise smart alarm to be woken up by your favorite song,” though I don’t necessarily recommend doing that if you want it to stay your favorite song.
It’s $139.99 and will be available later this year. It also comes with six months of Amazon’s Halo fitness service.