For those like me who find sleeping difficult – even in normal conditions – these two devices can possibly help, Dot or Reston registers your movements and give other statistics while Homni tells you about the room environment and can help with the aid or red light take you to sleep and, in the morning, via white light and alarm to wake you up again, quite a partnership.
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The Homni is circular 15cm tall and 10cm across, the bottom 6cm is solid and the top 9cm is open with the light source in it. The top part is opaque and the light source shines through it.
There is a digital clock on the front near the top of the base. Power goes into the back and at that point there are two USB ports to allow you to charge devices.
Press just below the light source 90 degrees to the left of the clock to get a strobing red light which you time your breathing to – this gradually strobes more slowly - so you should relax before sleep. Press 90 degrees to the right of the clock for a bright white light. You can even set the clock not to display at night.
Various alarms can be set and if you use them they start with a blue light which then changes to white in increasing intensity along with either a choice of built in tones or Bluetooth music from a source of your choice.
All the above facts and more are downloaded via Bluetooth to an App which is available from either the iOS or Android stores.
The Dot is a circular disc that has a magnetised back that you attach to your pillow and this tells you about how well or how badly you slept. The Reston is a strip of fabric that goes under your mattress to do much the same as the Dot but with extras. These are three separate items and Homni and Dot or the Homni and Reston can work together. If you wish either the Dot or Reston can work by themselves with the App.
I started with the Dot but for a while I got information from Homni but got nothing from Dot which caused a flurry of activities from their technical support before it was decided that the Dot was faulty and I was sent a replacement. Even then my problems were not over despite RTFM very thoroughly reading the downloadable PDF manual I still had great problems getting the data from Dot to my phone. Eventually I found a way by tapping Dot to wake it before downloading the data, there is no mention of this being required in the manual.
At this point I requested to be sent the Reston which is a similar device used by other such products.
The front page of the App shows which devices you have installed this can be Homni and Dot or Homni and Reston. My Dashboard which when clicked on will show output from Dot/Reston. Below this a figure up to 100 and a single word possibly Good down to Bad, next line is when you first slept to when you last woke. Next item is light control which allows you to select colour of your mood light and finally Bluetooth speaker.
Under the level of sleep and other data from Dot/Reston are four lots of nightly data gathered from Homni these are bedroom details, Temperature, Noise, Brightness and Humidity.
I will go into more details about Dot/Reston together with delving deeper into what lies deeper in the App in part two of this article which will follow in a few weeks. So far the accuracy looks better than most other sleep trackers.
The Homni is available for £197.90, the Dot for £40.93 and the Reston for £169.96, all from Amazon
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