If You Have Any Variety of Smart Beds, Sleep Apps Or Mattress Pads, They Know When You Sleep, Toss and Turn and May Be Able to Tell When You’re Having Sex

 by Julie Appleby*

Your bed could be watching you.

OK, so not with a camera.

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.

Arthur Rackham’s Sleeping Beauty

Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said 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 consumers learn more 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,” said Burcu Kilic, director of the digital rights program at Public Citizen, an advocacy group in Washington, DC.

The information “is also relevant and important to pharmaceutical companies and those that make hospital-related technology,” Kilic said.

Nonetheless, consumers are flocking to mattresses and under-mattress sensors aimed at quantifying sleep as well as sleep-tracking devices; sleep apps are among the most popular downloads on Apple and Android smartphones.

The Sleep Number bed is one of the most heavily marketed of such products, with press releases and ads often equating good sleep with a better life. Sales of the beds grew 6% from 2017 to $1.5 billion in 2018, company filings show. Early this year, the company signed a partnership with Ariana Huffington’s Thrive Global, a corporate wellness firm she launched after leaving The Huffington Post in 2016. Last year, the bed maker began a multiyear partnership with the NFL, in which the company gives its Sleep Number beds to players.