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Smart mattresses from Matrix track your HRV to get you a better night's sleep

If you’re looking to get a better night’s sleep, what better place to start your search than your mattress? After all, if you don’t have a solid foundation, it’s no wonder that you’re sleeping in fits and starts. The latest company to attempt to win your affections in the bedroom is Matrix, a smart mattress maker that claims to be the first to employ ballistocardiography in order to keep tabs on heart rate variability, breathing, movement, stress, and sleep cycles. Yes, it’s a mattress, but it’s also a highly sophisticated piece of technology.

Promising sleepers a holistic look at how their daily habits affect their nightly repose, the Matrix claims to provide customers with a veritable treasure trove of actionable data. Thanks to its companion app, you can determine not only how you slept, but how your actions in waking hours affected your sleep. How does it do this? It’s all dependent on your heart rate variability, or HRV. Considered a key indicator of overall health, HRV is effectively the inconsistency between your heart beats. A high HRV is generally correlated to a healthy diet and sufficient sleep, whereas a low HRV tends to indicate a lower fitness level and higher amounts of stress.

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The Matrix mattress, along with its companion app, is said to keep tabs on your HRV levels. You will be alerted when HRV is at its peak (which means it could be a good time for you to go work out), or when it’s particularly low (which means you might need to go home and relax).

While this smart mattress hangs it hat on technology, it has not forgotten its primary purpose — comfort. The mattress is made of cooling memory foam and all the sensors are integrated into the very bottom of the bed, which means that you won’t feel all the tech.

The Matrix also claims an “innovative fabric cover [that is] cool to the touch and wicks away moisture by circulating air and dissipating body heat.” Plus, it has a copper-infused zone (because apparently, copper is all the rage in mattresses these days).

Like other mattress startups, the Matrix comes to you in a box and will start at $1,000 for a twin. The mattress is slated to appear on Indiegogo in October.

Lulu Chang
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