Sleeping with the Nest Hub: Thoughts after one week of touchless tracking
Sleeping with the Nest Hub: Thoughts after one week of touchless tracking
7:17

Sleeping with the Nest Hub: Thoughts after one week of touchless tracking

Sleep
I spent the past week sleeping with Google. Let me rephrase that. I spent the past week sleeping next to the new nest hub. We liked the device overall. But, does the sleep tracking feature itself, hold up to scrutiny. We're diving in right. This is the new $100 nest hub. It's the second gen version of Google's very first smart display, and it looks pretty similar to the first. It has a lot of the same features like voice and touch controls, plus a few nice extras like improved sound and response time. But the main new thing, sleep track It uses radar to track your sleep without using a camera. It's pretty cool in concept actually. And I wanted to see how it works in practice. So I did something I'm usually Pretty good at slept. Obviously it was a heroic effort on my part. I also wore this Samsung Galaxy watch so I could compare the data. Let's dive in. I'll start by talking a little bit more about how Google's tech works. Then I'll take a look at the data compare it to a wearable Assess takeaways, etc. Then I'm probably going to be pretty tired so I'll probably go back to sleep. Here we go [BLANK_AUDIO] The magic ingredient in the source of sleep tracking is Google's soli radar chip, which initially debuted as a means of gesture control in the pixel for smartphones. The gesture controls are here too. You can hold up your hands to play or pause videos or music. You can wave your hand to snooze your alarm in the morning, but because solely can sense motion, its main purpose in the nest hub is to track your movement as you sleep it'll know if you're tossing and turning. It can detect your breathing. Combine that with new sensors for sound, light and temperature, and it can get a pretty good idea of both your sleep patterns and the conditions that led to them. If there are multiple people in the bed, it specifically watches the person closest to the display. And the sound sensors also listened for snoring or coughs and can track that as well. The sound data is processed locally and not sent to the cloud. And Google says it won't use any sleep data for ads. The tossing and turning stuff is set up so it can sync with apps like Google Fit. So let's take a look at some actual data in the morning. You can just ask how did I sleep? It looks like you slept a good amount but it was restless. You slept for 6 hours and 44 minutes. So here's what, you'll see. There are three overlapping circles showing schedule, quality and duration. Ideally you want all of them to line up on top of each other. If the duration or quality wasn't up to par, for instance, you'll notice that one of them kind of juts out And you heard the Google Assistant note that it wasn't quite up to par. scroll over and you'll see your respiratory rate and here's where it's noting coughing and snoring. And then you can tap to get a breakdown of the entire week, as well as the cough count and store minutes for the whole week And the average of your respiratory rate, but let's go back to that first page and tap the center of the circle to pull up a little bit more detail. Here you'll note total time asleep, time in bed before falling asleep. Then the graph of when you were asleep on a clock. The second page is that same graph but when you got into bed and woke up, and now you see that graph overlaid with the dark and temperature Info, a graph for snoring and coughing gets nicely detailed and pretty impressive given that it's touchless and works without a cam. You can't actually see previous day's data on here. But you can if you sync your device with the Google Fit App. There, you can tap on any given day to see all of the info and look back over the week. And now I have a clear understanding of why I was grouchy on Wednesday. I slept less than usual and there was this long dumb period in the middle of the night where I woke up and I couldn't fall back asleep and Google. Tracked all of that. Also, the bedtimes and wake up times have been pretty accurate in my experience, and it's nice seeing how long it took me to fall asleep on any given night. I even have a cat that comes and goes as she pleases, and that hasn't messed up Google's tracking reviewer Molly price has a dog and a husband that works and comes to bed at odd hours. Google even rolled with that the feature works well. But can it keep up with a wearable kinda, but not in some ways. So I have a smartwatch that's a little bit older, but it's still able to give me a touch more detail on just how deep I'm sleeping at any given time because it can sense my heart rate. I was fascinated to see this the first time I wore my watch to sleep and maybe a little bummed that I didn't reach the deepest level of sleep more often. Now this isn't gonna be possible with a touchless sensor and the wearable can obviously come with you and track if you want a couch nap. But the info tracked in both lined up to an acceptable degree. Google wasn't off with what it was measuring. It just obviously can't tell quite as much without measuring your heart rate. Last notes here, Google said this feature is only free for now just for this year. So you should know that going in if you want to invest in one of these for the sake of that sleep tracking feature. Also, Google is saying the right things about the data, but you're still giving that much more of your info to a giant tech company tread carefully. But even though it got less info than my watch, I still like the feature because I don't like wearing my watch at night. And I'm sure I'm not alone in this and the touchless sleep tracking got me some solid info about how I slept without that little bit of discomfort. Google also partnered with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to offer some advice based on your patterns. But I logged just enough nights to see some really simple stuff. Like go to bed at a consistent hour. Thanks mom. Also that restless night on Wednesday, I'm not sure having Google tell me about my lack of sleep, helped things. If anything, I felt that much more justified in letting myself feel extra tired and extra cranky. So there are a few things to keep in mind if you're buying this solely for sleep tracking, but the device is a good upgrade to the original nest of overall, the feature is free for now. The Tech is impressive and it works surprisingly well. Thanks for watching. comment below to let me know how you slept on Wednesday. I will feel much better if I know you're rested Now I genuinely do feel like I've earned a nice nap. I'd invite you to come watch and see if you can detect my breathing patterns and sleep patterns as well as Google, but that is probably a step too far. So I'm just, just gonna go genuinely excited about this nap. Thanks for watching, like and subscribe. [MUSIC]

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