Nintendo sleep monitor wants in on the internet of things revolution

Nintendo is planning an attack on the internet of things market with the release of a sleep monitor. The move is part of the Japanese gaming giant’s Quality of Life (QOL) initiative, that it first mentioned back in January.

“By using our know-how in gaming to analyse sleep and fatigue, we can create something fun," said Satoru Iwata, president and CEO of Nintendo during a recent earnings call, indicating that there would be some gamification aspects of the platform.

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The QOL sleep sensor will be non-wearable; it sits on your bedside cabinet and uses radio frequencies to measure breathing, movement and heart rate; with the analysis taking place in the cloud.

The Nintendo boss was keen to play down the wearable aspects of sleep sensors, making it clear than the QOL sleep monitor was a ‘non-wearable’ device and presenting a number of slides highlighting his perceived failings in the current sleep sensor-based recording devices.

However, Nintendo isn’t the first company with the bedside sleep monitor idea. Withings recently released the Aura; a kit for people who regularly suffer from poor sleep that tracks your sleep patterns and then wakes you up during your lightest sleep phase.

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And Sense, which is due to land before 2014 is up, is a sleep tracker that clips onto your pillow. The Pill unit detects the amount of movement you make during the night, with the processing done by the bedside unit, which receives information from the Pill and collates it together with temperature, ambient light and even noise as well for a detailed profile of your nightly.

Nintendo’s effort isn’t due to arrive until March 2016. We have a feeling that by then, the genre would have progressed somewhat and the much loved game giant may well be playing catch up….again.

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