Asleep interview: A more convenient way to track your sleep

We had the opportunity to interview David Lee at CES 2023, who is the CEO at Asleep. The company is based in South Korea and is on a mission to improve sleep tracking with their solution in a much more convenient way than we’re used to.

Mr. Lee explained in detail how their solution differs from those of their competitors, why it’s important that it works with various smart home products, and much more. You can read a brief overview of the interview below or check out the whole thing in the video above.

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Q: Can you tell me a little bit more about the company and what it wants to achieve?

A: Asleep is a company that wants to improve the way people sleep in a convenient way. And the convenient way in our opinion is to only use the help of a smartphone. So you don’t have to wear a watch or a similar product during sleep to track it, as that’s very inconvenient.

Using a smartphone is also convenient because 80 percent of people own one these days, so you don’t have to buy any other products. We track users’ sleep patterns by using sound, which gets picked up by the phone. This allows us to measure things like sleep apnea, snoring, and a bunch of other things.

Q: With your solution, you don’t have to wear a smartwatch and you don’t have to wear anything on your chest or on your head. So the software is just using the microphone from your smartphone?

A: Yes, that’s correct. All you have to do is make sure that the smartphone is in the bedroom or close to the person sleeping so that it can pick up the sounds. Our AI model is trained by the data gathered from one of the top hospitals in Korea — National University Hospital — which we worked with closely.

What’s interesting is that doctors in hospitals usually strap up to 20 monitors on a patient to track their sleep pattern, while with our solution, you just need a smartphone nearby. What’s also interesting is that our sleep tracking records outperformed those of Fitbit, Garmin, and a lot of other big companies in this space.

Q: Your solution also works with various smart home products. Can you please tell us a little bit more about that?

A: To improve people’s sleep, we have to do two things. The first one is to change human behavior, which we can do with the data our solution gathers, and the second is changing the environment in which a person sleeps. This is where the connection with smart home products comes in.

We’ve partnered up with LG Electronics, and our API works with their smart products to create a better sleep environment. So for example, it can automatically turn off the lights, set the AC at the right temperature for sleeping, and even control the air purifier to improve the air quality in the bedroom. All you have to do to make this work is place a smartphone next to your bed.

Q: Do you manufacture any hardware or are you focused solely on software?

A: No, we don’t produce any hardware. We only do software. Our Sleeptrack API gathers info, and we can then partner with other companies like Samsung, for example, which can use that data to make their products like air conditioners and air purifiers better.

Q: What exactly are you doing at CES? What are you trying to achieve here?

A: Our goal is to partner up with various big companies from the tech industry like Google and Amazon. But we’ve also already partnered up with companies from other fields like cosmetics.

We’ve had success here at CES since we’re already talking with more than 10 companies from various sectors that are trying to use our technology. We’re also talking with NASA about how to improve sleep for astronauts in space.

We’ll definitely be back to CES next year and already have plans to expand out our booth in order to showcase the entire sleep environment we have in mind to people.

This is just a quick overview of the conversation we had with David Lee from Asleep. If you want to learn more, check out the video at the top of the page.