Having trouble sleeping? The second-generation Google Nest Hub, announced Tuesday, promises to help improve your shut eye.
The $99 smart display features a Google Soli motion sensing chip that allows it to track your sleep when placed on a bedside table. The motion sensor basically creates an invisible, contactless tracking bubble around the person sleeping closest to the device. It can detect movements large and small—such as when you get up to use the bathroom, take a sip of water, roll over, or even breathe—all without a camera or requiring you to wear a device to bed.
And thanks to its built-in microphones, it can also detect coughing and snoring. During a call with reporters about the new feature, a Google spokesperson said it might accidentally pick up noise caused by co-sleepers, but the company is actively working on improvements to prevent that from happening. Additional sensors allow it to detect light and temperature changes in the room to help you better understand how those factors affect your shut eye.
In the morning, you’ll get a sleep summary showing the duration and quality of your rest, including what time you fell asleep, how long it took you to drift off, and a timeline of any coughing and snoring. It also keeps track of weekly sleep trends, such as your cough count, minutes spent snoring, and respiration rate (the number of breaths you take per minute).
After several nights of analysis, it starts offering actionable recommendations to help improve your sleep, based on guidance from organizations like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It might, for instance, offer to assist in setting up a smart home routine that dims your lighting and plays relaxing sounds to help you wind down. Over time, it also starts to understand your sleep patterns and will recommend an ideal sleep schedule.
Google trained its Sleep Sensing algorithms with more than 100,000 nights of sleep data from around 15,000 people. It validated its algorithm’s performance against actual sleep lab studies, and found “no statistical difference.” And despite requiring zero contact with the body, Google says its sleep tracking technology is “on par or better” than a variety of consumer wearables. As such, the new sleep sensing feature should be a nice option for those who find it too uncomfortable to wear a fitness tracker or smartwatch to bed.
Unlike most sleep-tracking wearables, Google’s technology won’t tell you how much time you spent in each sleep stage, including light, deep, and REM sleep.
“Sleep staging is interesting information for people and we’re exploring launching this—but the fact is that once you go to sleep—your body does what it’s going to do,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to PCMag. “We really wanted to focus the experience on areas of sleep that matter for health AND that people can have some control over—empowering people by focusing them on things they can change. So we’re making a point of highlighting your duration, schedule, and quality—and when it comes to quality—highlighting things like your environment and respiratory behaviors—which can be conducive or disruptive to the quality of your sleep—but these are things you can actually influence.”
Sleep Sensing will be available on the new Nest Hub as a free preview until 2022, after which you may have to pay extra for it. The feature will be completely optional, and a visual indicator on the display will indicate when it’s active. For the sake of privacy, it only detects motion, not bodies or faces. Coughing and snoring audio is processed on the device, not sent to Google’s servers.
Google says it decided not to put a camera in the new Nest Hub so people feel comfortable putting the device in their bedroom. That’s a nice privacy assurance, but the trade-off is that, unlike the Amazon Echo Show, you can’t use the Nest Hub for video calls, which was one of our complaints about the original model.
Aside from its Sleep Sensing capabilities, Google says the new Nest Hub features 50% more bass than the original model for improved audio when streaming music. In addition, a new Quick Gestures feature lets you pause or play content by simply making a gesture in front of the display. That should come in handy if you have the Nest Hub in the kitchen and need to pause a cooking video when your hands are dirty. If you have it in the bedroom, you can simply wave your hand in front it to snooze your morning alarm.
Like the Nest Mini and Nest Audio, the Nest Hub features a machine learning chip that studies your common commands and caches them on the device. That way, it can more quickly respond to those requests in the future.
It also features an integrated Thread radio, making it compatible with the new Connected Home over IP (CHIP) smart home connectivity standard Google is developing alongside Amazon, Apple, the Zigbee Alliance, and others. The CHIP standard aims to increase compatibility among smart home devices.
In terms of aesthetics, the second-gen Nest Hub looks a lot like its predecessor, but features a new edgeless glass display, which Google says is easier to clean and improves the photo frame experience. It comes in chalk (light gray), charcoal (dark gray), mist (mint green), or sand (tannish pink), colors that match the new Nest Thermostat. It’s available for pre-order now via the Google Store and is slated for release on March 30.
Stay tuned for PCMag’s full review of the new Nest Hub. In the meantime, check out The Best Sleep Tech for Catching Your ZZZs.
