Surveillance capitalism is about to start tracking yet another aspect of your life. This time, it’s your breathing that’s up for grabs. Amazon last night announced the Halo Rise, a night-time gadget designed to keep an eye on your nocturnal habits. The sleeping ones, anyway.
It’s not just a tracker, of course. That would be far harder to allow in a bedroom so it can watch you sleep. Amazon’s newest gizmo is a bedside lap but with smart features. A gradually increasing light when you wake up, to simulate a sunrise, is just the start.
A game of Halo
The Halo Rise is also able to keep an eye on most of what takes place in your bedroom. No, not that. It’ll monitor temperature, humidity, and room brightness — that last for obvious reasons. But it also wants to watch you sleep. It’ll watch someone sleep, anyway.
Whoever is closest to Amazon’s new bedside assistant will have their breathing patterns tracked. It’ll use your body’s movements to determine what sort of sleep stages you’re entering and provide feedback for later use. Maybe slow down on the cheese and pickles just before bed, yeah?
The tracking is for one person only, however. If there’s a second person in the bed, the Halo Rise is smart enough to exclude their data. It’s not smart enough to register it as well, though we don’t believe that. It probably could, but Amazon just wants to sell more than one Rise to each household. Because capitalism.
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On the upside, the company says that this tracking is performed without resorting to cameras and microphones. Amazon doesn’t have to install those if we’re being totally logical. They’re already inside the company’s range of Echo devices, which probably already occupy space in your home. The Halo Rise plays nice with Alexa-enabled devices in general so you can integrate it into a smart home fairly easily. Or, rather, you can when it’s available.
Amazon’s Halo Rise is set to launch later this year. When it does, it’ll watch you snore from R2,550 ($140). If you’ve always wondered just how close you’re coming to a sleep apnea-facilitated conclusion each night, this little smart assistant should do the job.