LivWell Spotlight: Perfect your mattress with Eight Sleep

Our LivWell Spotlight series focuses on how health and technology overlap, covering ways to improve wellness with the right tools.

The Eight Sleep is a smart mattress or mattress cover that heats or cools your bed, and measures how well you sleep. I got the cover, which you place over your current mattress. You then sync it to an app on your phone that lets you control the temperature.

Setting up Eight Sleep

As you can see in the photo above, you set temperatures for four points throughout the night. And if you have a partner, don’t worry, the mattress or mattress cover divides the bed in half if you need it to. You can also check out your partner’s settings through the app.

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I manually set the temperatures you see above, but there’s also an option to let the mattress learn what you like and adjust automatically (autopilot mode) for an additional fee.

In addition to the temperature settings, what I also like about Eight Sleep is that it tracks your sleep metrics and gives you a sleep score when you wake up.

measuring your sleep

It measures quality, routine and time slept.

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For quality, it looks at things like REM sleep (suggests 1 hr 30 min per night), deep sleep (suggests 1 hr 10 min per night), heart rate and breath rate, among other things.

For time slept, it suggests seven to nine hours per night. You can see when you fell asleep, woke up and how many hours you totaled by the morning.

And for routine, it checks to see if you are going to bed and waking up around the same windows every night and morning. You can set these times, but the app will start to recognize your pattern even if the time you input isn’t accurate and base your score on that.

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other features

The mattress can also wake you up with a vibration setting as an alarm.

The app has some other features, most of which you have to access with the pro paid account. I don’t pay for an account though and still think it’s worth getting.