[ad#co-1]
Adults have less deep sleep as children – and got used to it. They should not give up. Variowell Development – a German based R&D company – has developed a bed which actually is changing sleep patterns. It uses sleep phase data as collected by smart watches or other smart devices. These data are used in real time to adjust the firmness of the bed accordingly. In light sleep it firms up the surface for better support of the spine. In deep sleep it becomes softer as not to disturb this important part of the sleep. And just before wake up, the firmness is increased again, to minimize the risk of a deep sleep phase while waking up. Variowell will present a prototype of this bed at CES 2016, Las Vegas.
Sleep smart with the Variowell bed
Children experience our world with greater intensity: They create completely new worlds in their imaginations while they play. They forget about everything else going on in their lives while spending a day at the pool. Their energy is completely restored after just a few hours of deep sleep. Over the course of their lives, many people forget how to have this kind of restorative sleep. Many adults spend far too little of their time asleep in deep sleep. Restless nights and exhaustion in the morning have become the norm. Yet poor sleep can be prevented: The smart Variowell bed improves sleep quality by automatically adjusting its firmness to the individual stages of sleep. After all, it certainly must be possible to enjoy deep, restorative sleep as an adult.
When purchasing a bed or mattress, most people only think about their back health. Hardly anyone is concerned with the most important thing a good bed should provide: high sleep quality. Many people forget that it is NOT normal to wake up several times during the night, lie awake for hours, or only rarely enter into the deep stages of sleep. They have come to accept their persistently poor sleep quality and believe that they forever lost that restorative sleep they had known from their childhoods when they became adults. Very few people know that a bed can actively influence sleep quality when it changes during the night.
The secret to good sleep
The length of the deep sleep stages is fundamental for restorative sleep. Several times per night, sleepers interrupt their deep sleep stages by tossing and turning when the pressure load from their body weight becomes too great on the side they are lying on. Sleepers thus need a particularly soft bed to minimize the pressure load and thus reduce their number of movements so they can stay in deep sleep for as long as possible. Nevertheless, we spend the majority of our time sleeping in light stages of sleep. In these stages, sleepers need a firm bed to support the spine. “This means that the solution could only be a bed that is soft in deep sleep, but firm otherwise,” says Tobias Kirchhoff, Managing Director of Variowell Development GmbH.
Momentum from Silicon Valley
In Silicon Valley, 150 startups are already working on products that focus on healthy sleep. Successful companies have realized that there is a lot of catching up to do in this field and are developing technologies such as trackers, apps, and sensors to analyze sleep. Variowell Development is taking advantage of these innovative technologies and has partnered with a major polyurethane manufacturer to develop multi-dynamic foams. Thermal energy causes the firmness of these special foams to change — in a unique and patented way. The development team was able to design a smart bed that uses a sensor to analyze sleep quality and automatically adjust the bed’s firmness to the user’s individual sleep stages.
Sleep smart with Variowell
Variowell has developed its own app that uses external sensors (e.g., in a smartphone or smartwatch) to record sleep quality data and send that data to the bed via Bluetooth. As soon as the sensors identify a light sleep stage, the bed automatically becomes firmer to support the spine. During deep sleep stages, on the other hand, the bed is soft so that no one point of pressure will become too great to disrupt this restorative stage of sleep. Sleepers can adjust these settings as they see fit. By automatically adapting to the stages of sleep, the Variowell bed not only supports back health, but also sleep quality by promoting the stages of deep sleep.
Not only the stages of sleep, but also the waking up process can play a major role in enhancing sleep quality. Waking up well means waking up in a light stage of sleep. Getting woken up from a deep stage of sleep can make you feel tired and out of sorts. That is why the app asks for your wakeup time so that the bed will become firmer as it gets closer to the time you should wake up. This, in turn, reduces the likelihood that you will be woken up from a stage of deep sleep. Wakeup phases are gently introduced, thus allowing Variowell to create a unique sleeping experience from the time you fall asleep to the time you wake up.
About Variowell Development GmbH
From January 6-9, 2016, Variowell Development GmbH will be exhibiting at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas (Eureka Park 80-235). A beta model of the bed will be on display. Delivery of the beds will begin this coming May.
Variowell is an R&D company based in Münster, Germany. The company was founded in 2008 and is financed by private equity. The company’s core business is developing product concepts based on dynamic, polyurethane foams that can be electronically controlled to allow them to change their firmness at any time. The dynamic foam concept is secured through an extensive portfolio of IP rights. Further information is available at: www.variowell-development.com.
