This smart light bulb will monitor your health — but it's a bit creepy

This smart light bulb will monitor your health — but it's a bit creepy

Among a series of smart home devices unveiled at CES 2022, Sengled has unveiled a light bulb that monitors your health. Yes, you read that correctly.

Compared to smart health monitoring lights, all good smart light bulbs look like a bunch of nonsense that you just turn on and off with an app or voice assistant; Sengled's bulb is much more sophisticated and along with selected biometric tracking, sleep It promises tracking.

The question is, do I want the bulb to know how much I'm snoozing (or not) throughout the night? The Google Nest Hub (2nd generation) sleep sensing was already creepy because I felt like something was watching me while I was visiting dreamland. I think a fitness tracker that I wear all night would be even more intimate, but most of the time it's tucked under the covers. A light bulb that tracks sleep will always have the upper hand.

Just kidding, Sengled's smart health monitoring light is seriously cool and probably the most ambitious smart light innovation I've seen in a while. The best attempt to improve on basic smart bulbs in recent years has been the addition of sterilization technology, although the home-safe sterilization feature has its drawbacks.

Smart health monitoring lights focus on personal health rather than home antimicrobial defenses. The bulb claims to read heart rate, temperature, and other vital signs via a completely noninvasive sensor. Instead of a passive infrared (PIR) sensor, it uses a radar sensor, which can read through the material, allowing for more sensitive detection. Ideally, the higher sensitivity would allow the bulbs to detect different people, see movement through fabrics, and other complex off-skin health tracking.

According to Sengled, a collection of smart health monitoring light bulbs are connected via a bluetooth mesh to create a virtual map of the home, relying on multiple "perspectives" for complete health tracking. To be clear, the bulbs have no built-in cameras or anything. It can neither see you nor record you.

I don't know how I feel about that. On the one hand, it's still creepy. On the other hand, I already live surrounded by smart home devices that know my ideal sleep temperature, when to turn off the lights, who is in the living room, and how much I like to reheat leftover pizza. Since Alexa can tell you the health metrics collected by the Amazon Halo fitness tracker, having an external device that actually collects some of these metrics doesn't seem so far-fetched. Similarly, it would be useful for those who do not wear a fitness tracker but want (or need) to check their vitals on a regular basis.

In any case, there is still time to decide what your stance is; the Sengled Health Monitoring Light will not be available until the fourth quarter of this year, and as of this writing, no pricing information is available.

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