Hello Sense sleep tracker review

Backed on Kickstarter sometime last year, my Hello Sense unit materialised without much warning. I've had it about 2 weeks now, so I think it's about time for a review. 

The Sense consists of two parts - an orb about the size of a small apple that lives on your nightstand and low-powered Bluetooth trackers called "pills" that clip onto your pillow. 

Physical design

Design wise, this thing is lovely. The unboxing and styling is very Apple-influenced, with all the packaging designed to warm you up to loving the device. The orb glows pleasingly with different colours to indicate what's going on (purple is pairing mode, for example) and it has a sharp modern look about it that makes it feel a bit like an art object on my nightstand rather than just another piece of technology. 

The little pills that clip onto your pillow are pretty cute. They have jaws of doom however and are a complete bastard to get onto the pillow, but once they're on, they're on - so at least they're not going to pop off in the night and disappear into the bed someplace.  I worry about accidentally washing them, but I'll cross that bridge when it happens (extra pills are $59 each, though, so I hope they have decent customer service when that does happen, because that's not cheap).

My one complaint about the design? They made the plug round instead of a neat rectangle (the orb needs to be plugged in, and it's a bit fussy about the cable it gets given), so it takes up two plug spaces on my power strip. I intend to swap it with a neater USB plug at some point.

Setup

Sadly, the setup somewhat ruins the initial design good feels. It was a complete pain in the arse to get connected. Putting the orb on the wifi went smoothly enough, but pairing the pills was hit and miss. I bought two pills, one for me, one for Husband (who doesn't give a monkey's about sleep tracking, but I want a comparison point), and we struggled to pair both. You have to do this shaking thing while the orb is in pairing mode, and the Bluetooth processes kept crashing, so you feel ridiculous and you spend a lot of time waiting for phones to reboot. It all appeared to be faulty software, at least, so hopefully they can iron that out, but I'm not looking forward to having to replace or change the setup any time soon. 

So, what does it do?  

Via the app, you can always see the current status of the bedroom - it shows you the current temperature, light level, sound level and humidity plus all of those over time in a graph. If you pass your hand over the orb, it'll glow a colour to indicate the current room quality based on these values. The Kickstarter advertised a particulate sensor, that at first I thought was missing, but for whatever reason it's not available with the other data in the "right now" screen, you only get to view this via the "before sleep" tab as an AQI value. I assume because they don't want to show the average out of context.

Based on these values and the movement of your pillow, it has a go at telling you when you're sleeping and how soundly. If you have forced your loving bed partner into tracking their sleep too, the app will reflect that in the overnight data, indicating when you were both moving or if it thinks it was just you. In the morning, you'll get a sleep score - mine hovers around 82 most nights. I think that's OK, but I'm not sure what it really means because Husband's is roughly the same and he definitely sleeps better than I do so I really don't know how it's being calculated.

The sleep tracking data quality is on a par with the data I get from my current FitBit Force (and Jawbone Up I had before), but it attempts to quantify it more by telling you about conditions before bed and asking you a few questions about how you slept and your habits. It says things like "you move in bed 13% more than other sense users" and it constantly tells me my room is too warm - got it - but attempts to lower the temp haven't been praised or shown to improve my sleep yet. I want a pat on the head! But my sleep quality is my own fault and I should feel bad, I guess. But in short, the data looks about right. Consumer level sleep trackers just aren't that detailed, and this one is no exception - but at least I don't have to physically wear a device to get a similar quality to that of a Jawbone or Fitbit.

The thing I like most - the alarm. I've switched to just using the sense alarm, because they have really nice sounds that aren't shrill and jarring, it fades up slowly in volume and the little orb glows a pale blue to wake me up. I just have to wave my hand over it to shut it up. It really is that future feeling I want out of my personal tech, plus it stops me reaching for my old alarm (my phone) which helps delay me checking my email. However, it doesn't have snooze so I've just set up a series of alarms 10 mins apart to fake it, but I really hope they add that (snooze could be a short wave over, off could be a triple wave over or something, Hello guys).

The thing I'm saddest about? The Kickstarter said it would have a white/pink noise generator for falling asleep. It's not there. They haven't done it. I use a few apps on my iPad for this already (I actually usually opt for rainstorm sounds - I think I miss the motherland), but I was super excited to have a noise generator connected to a sleep tracker, so I could build up some data on what sounds work best. I'm bummed they didn't add that - I'm hoping they still will, after all, the orb is basically a Bluetooth speaker. If they would just open it up to let me pass whatever audio out I wanted to the Bluetooth that'd work, too.  

Oh, and while I'm begging for features - there is no way to connect this system to anything else in the house/life. I can't even get it to send me an email with the day's stats that I could then IFTTT out to do something else based on that (Slept badly last night? Here's a reminder to go to bed earlier. Room too hot again? Turn on a fan. That sort of thing). If I could communicate with it, I'd be able to use the speaker for notifications or set light sequences for things, too. Oh, and can I have a web interface with an export? I hate having my data locked away and the small screen is not ideal for studying graphs. 

In summary

Pros: 

• Slick modern design
• Nice alarm
• Good for bed sharers
• Data quality on par with FitBit Force
• Don't have to wear anything on my body for tracking

Cons:

• Pain in the butt to setup
• No snooze
• No white noise generator
• No API / integration points
• Lack of detailed particulate information
• Data only accessible via the app

The Sense orb + 2 pills cost me $129 during their Kickstarter campaign. The same setup today would cost $188, which is really pushing their luck on price point.

So, do I like it? Yeah, I do, although it feels a little under developed right now. I don't think there's anything I'm griping about that can't be fixed in the software, so I hope they keep working on that to improve the data / feature set and if they open up an API there's plenty of opportunity there to do some cool stuff. I've got my fingers crossed that this isn't just a one trick pretty pony.

Figuring out a theft with Dropcam

When we first moved into our apartment block, our neighbours reported that they'd had bicycles stolen from inside the building (usually from the garage) and they weren't really sure how folks were doing it.  At least one time it had been because the old garage door had been wrenched open, but this more recent time it seemed to be more of a mystery - no sign of damage or forced entry.  They discussed wanting to install a camera to record what was going on with the garage, so we offered to sort something out for them (given that we're the gadget nerds of the building and had an idea of how to do it on the cheap).

Main problem: we had to figure out how to get wifi down to the garage.  First we tried extending our wifi network down there, but that proved super flakey (concrete is not a great connectivity vehicle).  Eventually, we worked out that the garage was able to pick up our network over powerline, so we set up an airport down there to connect to that and feed a connection to a mounted Dropcam (they annoying only work on wifi).

We've had the camera in there for about a year now, and we've caught a few incidents - neighbours breaking the garage door, that sort of simple thing, but then finally we caught the "stealing a bike from a locked garage" trick:

So, in short. Make sure your garage door always closes behind you.

The basic setup

Let's run over the setup in the house so far, on a basic "what's plugged in and actually working and connected" level.

Nest Thermostat

The Nest thermostat was the first bit I picked up. It wasn't available to me until I moved Stateside and the slick-looking design had me.  It arrived on a week Husband was away and I was dubious about setting it up myself, having never opened up the wiring for a thermostat before, but it turned out to be a piece of cake. 

Unboxing the nest

The Nest works decently. Living in San Francisco in a relatively new apartment, we don't have a lot of issues with heating (we don't have central air for cooling, either) , so it mostly just gets to do nothing except report the temperature hovering at roughly the same value all the time. It had a bunch of issues staying on the WiFi but recent firmware updates seem to have cleared that up. So, it's cute, but I feel bad that we don't live somewhere more interesting for it to do its thing.

Nest (now owned by Google) also now owns DropCam, which we've got a couple of.  We're only using the one in the garage right now, but it's very reliable.

SmartThings Hub

Basically, all these "smart home" setups require some sort of controlling hub device.  There's a few on the market, and I ended up getting a SmartThings hub last year (so it's the first gen one).  I went with this one because at the time it seemed to leave the most doors open to me - not only did it connect with its own devices, it also connected to Belkin, Philips, Sonos and a few others, plus it had IFTTT integration.  I'm pretty sure most of the hubs on the market these days do similar door-propping-open exercises, but I haven't bothered to check.  The main downside is it'll lock you into that hub's API and apps for the most part, and SmartThings is hardly the best app - it's slow and finicky to setup - but their API is handy and I'll explain why another day.  A bunch of our lights and dimmers and such are controlled via SmartThings, notably:

• My desk electronics (except my laptop charger) are plugged into a power strip connected to a smart switch. A movement sensor triggers that switch on and off depending on whether I'm at my desk or not, so the lights are only on when I'm actually using them. 
• I have a remote in the bedroom that lets me control the lights - I can toggle on and off the bedside lights (both connected to their own switches) and the ceiling lights.  I can also use the remote to trigger the "Good Morning" action in Smarthings, which brings on the lights and has the Bedroom Sonos play the days weather forecast.  
• We've replaced the dimmers in the bedroom, living room, dining area and kitchen with the smart dimmers - so they're all controllable from the app.  They are all configured to turn off when we leave the house (both of us - our presence is set by our phones location within the house geofence), and have automatic lighting sequences configured for vacation time.
• The kitchen has a motion sensor to detect activity in there, and toggles the dimmers on and off appropriately.
• Likewise, the living room lights come on at dusk and toggle on and off based on our activity via a motion sensor.
• All the downstairs lights turn off when activity ceases, and all the lights in the house turn off when I trigger the "Good night" action on Smartthings.
• The hall light turns on when the front door opens (this is one of my favourite interactions - subtle, but very effective).
• We have open/close sensors on the office window (so I know when Husband has forgotten to close it when we go out - it's the only easily people-accessible window) and the external doors.

So, that's the basics. Back soon to cover some of the more custom parts.

Welcome to Wodehouse

About a year or so ago I installed a SmartThings Hub and a few switches into our apartment (which we fondly call “Wodehouse”).  I’ve been slowly accruing other features and niceties for the house and trying to automate as much as I can, and I’ve tried out a bunch of different personal devices to help the house connect with me.  

Why?  Because I’m a child who grew up reading and watching sci-fi and I want a house that just takes care of us without interference on my part. I suppose it’s the “Smart Home” that these IoT companies market, but it’s more of a wanting my house to feel like a part of the family.  I’ve decided to start documenting how that’s working out and what works and what doesn’t.  

It may also stand as a record of how Wodehouse ended up murdering us in our sleep.  But who knows!