Review: Apple's Beddit Sleep Monitor Offers a Comprehensive Look at Sleep Quality

[newellj]

And if you are not sleeping well you know about it and you invariably know why. For the overwhelming majority, this is expensive and uneccessary. Health services throughout the world are being clogged up with people who present themselves for no genuine reason and this is impacting negatively on the genuinely sick. You do NOT need hardware to tell you your room is too hot, too cold, too noisy, too light, too humid, because commonsense tells you this and has been doing so for hundreds of years. Arguably, the focus on health is going too far.

These assertions are, on their face, among the most farcical and ridiculous I've seen this week, and I just came from the WaPo and NYT websites where I was reading about the latest antics of the current U.S. administration. Beyond temperature and humidity, most people, especially people who sleep alone, have no way of figuring out any sleep quality symptoms or causes. Things like snoring and sleep apnea simply cannot be detected when you are not awake.

I think it's a fair question whether or to what extent devices like Beddit can really help you improve your sleep, but they can certainly help spot symptoms that may require assistance.

 

[michaelant]

I run a fan for white noise, every night, even in winter. Wonder if Beddit would be able to pick up snoring (which I sometimes do) over the sound of the fan...

 

[nnoble]

These assertions are, on their face, among the most farcical and ridiculous I've seen this week, and I just came from the WaPo and NYT websites where I was reading about the latest antics of the current U.S. administration. Beyond temperature and humidity, most people, especially people who sleep alone, have no way of figuring out any sleep quality symptoms or causes. Things like snoring and sleep apnea simply cannot be detected when you are not awake.

I think it's a fair question whether or to what extent devices like Beddit can really help you improve your sleep, but they can certainly help spot symptoms that may require assistance.

Read carefully: 'For the overwhelming majority......'

 

[IJ Reilly]

Read carefully: 'For the overwhelming majority......'

This does not make your statement any more accurate, it only shows how little you know about this subject.

Disordered sleep is one of the most widespread medical issues. You could look that up, if you don't believe me. It frequently defies effective treatment, if for no other reason than medical science has never fully determined why we even need to sleep. If you've ever experienced disordered sleep (I take from your remarks you have not), all doctors will be able to tell you is it probably stems from some other condition, because sleep disorders are generally seen not as a disease but as a symptom. If it doesn't result from something relatively obvious, such as apnea, the cause can be almost to completely impossible to find. And again, because the science of sleep is so incomplete.

Does this product help any? No idea about that or what Apple is thinking they can do with it. Maybe they see an opportunity to advance sleep science. If they could it would be a great thing for the huge number of disordered sleepers around the world. They exist whether you know about them or not. Which, now you do.

 

[newellj]

This does not make your statement any more accurate, it only shows how little you know about this subject.

Agreed, "overwhelming majority" is a gross and unsupported generalization.

The tech in the Beddit 3 and the Emfit QS is very rich and probably capable of more than these companies are currently doing with it. It will be interesting to see what Apple has in mind for the future.

 

[TooUnCool]

I have been using Beddit virtually since it was released and have generally been happy with it.

What concerns me is that up until recently they were offering a "family" web site (family.beddit.com) where you could log on and see a lot more of the data they are storing on their servers. Noticing it was redirecting to the main beddit.com site I contacted their support team who confirmed that the site had been taken down and that "There is no other method of excel export at present, and no future iterations of Beddit Family are planned".

I confess to being intensely uncomfortable about them taking such personal data, storing it yet providing users with no access to it whatsoever, other than via their locked down app.

I would be interested in knowing whether anyone shares these concerns?

 

[nnoble]

I have been using Beddit virtually since it was released and have generally been happy with it.

What concerns me is that up until recently they were offering a "family" web site (family.beddit.com) where you could log on and see a lot more of the data they are storing on their servers. Noticing it was redirecting to the main beddit.com site I contacted their support team who confirmed that the site had been taken down and that "There is no other method of excel export at present, and no future iterations of Beddit Family are planned".
I confess to being intensely uncomfortable about them taking such personal data, storing it yet providing users with no access to it whatsoever, other than via their locked down app. I would be interested in knowing whether anyone shares these concerns?

Yes, absolutely concerned. I don't have Beddit but when I voiced concerns on the 'one-stop shop' for medical info thread about what big companies do with our data the post was deleted because it was 'political'. Well of course it's political, big data and big business is by its very nature. It was an otherwise innocuous post so whether it was a trigger happy moderator or macrumors is squeamish about this I don't know. But if we can't talk about that here then where?

 

[TooUnCool]

Interesting. The (always appropriately breezy and friendly) support guy gave me one of these b/s "sorry for the inconvenience" responses not seeming to realise that many people consider this sort of thing a big deal. If we restrict the discussion to Beddit here, nobody can accuse of us of being political irrespective of the wider implications.

Let's see what happens to these posts!

 

[TooUnCool]

You might be interested in this response from the chatty support guy at Beddit, below in quotes. He neglects to mention that their privacy policy says the square root of jack and points us to the Apple Privacy Policy, which says even less apart, of course, that they can sell our sleep data to third parties. I also question the statement about the data in the cloud being unusable; if it is, why bother storing it and what use would it be to third parties? I have responded asking further questions.

"I understand it's disappointing, and perhaps there's some confusion on what Beddit Family was and how that's different from what the cloud is, including your cloud data. To be clear, you may delete your data from the cloud at anytime by declining Beddit's Cloud Terms & Conditions. Your data will immediately be wiped from the cloud and it will only be stored locally on your device thereafter.

Beddit Family was a web app. It provided a desktop long-term view of the same data on your app (with the exception being to our beta-tested HRV data, which is no longer measured and was removed as well from Family before it was taken down). Beddit Family was a silent feature released as a beta tool to users asking for long-term views and exportable data. We did not market or support it, and only mentioned its existence to people who requested a way to export their data. It was used by relatively few users--several dozen, perhaps a hundred--and the resources required to support it outweighed its use. Ultimately, Beddit is intended to be an entirely mobile experience. Whether that includes data export time will tell, but as I said earlier there is no timetable for if or when that will happen.

To be clear on what Beddit Family was, and was not: Family wasn't access to cloud data. The raw data stored in the cloud is in a compressed raw code format that's unusable."