The Pillow That Reads Your Mind

Taking a power nap is a great way to recharge your batteries, but as anyone who’s fond of an afternoon snooze will tell you, napping for too long can leave you feeling even groggier than you were before. Enter Sony’s new smart pillow.

An electrode attached to the pillow’s surface rests against your head as you sleep, monitoring your brain waves – the rhythms in your neural activity.

Different stages of sleep are associated with different brain wave frequencies – REM sleep, the stage when we dream, is characterised by relatively rapid ‘alpha’ brain waves, for instance.  So the pillow can tell not only when you’re sleeping, but also how deeply.

This means the device could be programmed to sound an alarm just after a period of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and before you go back into deep sleep, so that you wake up less disorientated. Patent application number: US 20130035541