Google seem to be leveraging its Nest Labs expertise to enter in health & wellness segment. Nest Labs, well known for their learning thermostat which basically tries to read mood of the user and work best, targeting now on “sleep tracking” . The company announced recently that its second generation Nest Hub includes sleep sensing feature t hat user radar-based sleep tracking in addition to an algorithm for cough and snore detection. This seem to be first ever move into health and wellness segment with its smart display products.
“One thing we learned with the original Nest Hub is that the bedroom was one of the most popular places people put their display,” said Ashton Udall, senior product manager, Google Nest, speaking to reporters during a media briefing.
Nest Hub’s sleep sensing feature demonstrates the first wellness application of Soli, a miniature radar sensor that can be used for gesture sensing at various scales, from a finger tap to movements of a person’s body, according to Michael Dixon, software engineer, and Reena Singhal Lee, product manager, at Google Health in a blog post.
The low-energy radar technology can only detect motion, not specific bodies or faces. The Nest Hub analyzes movement and breathing at night, all without a camera or wearing devices to bed.
“In Pixel 4, Soli powers motion sense, enabling touchless interactions with the phone to skip songs, snooze alarms, and silence phone calls. We extended this technology and developed an embedded Soli-based algorithm that could be implemented in Nest Hub for sleep tracking,” Dixon and Lee wrote.