A Wake-Up Call On Smart Beds And Sleep Apps That Collect Your Data

Your bed could be watching you. OK, so not with a camera. At least not yet. But if you have any of a variety of “smart beds,” mattress pads or sleep apps, it knows when you go to sleep. It knows when you toss and turn. It may even be able to tell when you’re having sex. Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, says it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers. “This gives us the intelligence to be able to continue to feed our algorithms,” CEO Shelly Ibach told attendees at a Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego last month. Analyzing all that personal data, Ibach continued, not only helps Sleep Number inform consumers who use one of their 360 models about their health, but also aids the company’s efforts to make a better product. Still, consumer-privacy advocates are increasingly raising concerns about the fate of personal health information, which is potentially valuable to companies that collect and sell it, gathered through a growing number of internet-connected devices. “We don’t know what happens to all that data,” says Burcu Kilic, director of the digital rights program at Public Citizen, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C. The information “is also relevant and important to pharmaceutical companies and those that make hospital-rel...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized apps sleep tech Source Type: news