Smart home brand Sengled is making a light bulb that'll monitor your health stats, including sleep habits, heart rate and body temperature. It'll also be able to detect if someone in the room has fallen down. It's already picked up an Innovation Award at CES 2022.
Innovative is the word for it. Sure today's best smart bulbs are impressive, and it's not the first time we've seen a brand experimenting with bulbs that do more than just create an atmospheric glow (last year, we saw smart bulbs that could blast bacteria from your home surfaces), but this is quite the leap forward in… er.. light bulb technology.
The Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Light is a dual-chip WiFi / Bluetooth smart bulb that uses radar technology to keep an eye on your vital stats. There's something about your light bulb that feels unsettling, but we're perfectly happy to strap sensors to our bodies every day, so for the gadget fan this could be a way to get the data you want without the need for a potentially uncomfortable wearable. That point is particularly relevant for sleep data – today's best sleep trackers are still mostly wrist-based.
You'll be able to use one health monitoring bulb on its own, or connect multiple bulbs up via a Bluetooth mesh network that covers a larger area, to create a virtual 'map' of your home, without the need for cameras. That's especially helpful when it comes to this bulb's fall detection feature. We have that in the Apple Watch already, but this seems more OAP friendly.
According to Tom's Guide, the Sengled bulb uses a radar sensor rather than a passive infrared (PIR) sensor, which means it's more sensitive and can read information through materials. It's predicted to hit the market in the fourth quarter of 2022, and we don't know how much it'll cost yet.
