At last month’s OktoberTech Silicon Valley, German semiconductor company Infineon launched contactless, privacy-centric sleep quality technology that can be integrated into OEM end devices such as bedside lamps, televisions, smart speakers and air purifiers.

Leveraging Infineon’s 60GHz radar, PSoC and wifi technologies, the Xensiv sleep quality service is designed to measure and help optimise the user’s sleep based on individual needs. OEMs can now bring their sleep quality enabled end devices to market in up to one third of the time and focus on functionality that leverages their ecosystem to improve users’ quality of life.

A lack of healthy sleep can result in significant health risks such as depression and heart disease. Furthermore, research suggests fatigue from insufficient sleep results in a loss of as much as $411bn per year to the US economy, while drowsy driving is a likely factor in up to 16.5% of fatal motor vehicle crashes. Improving sleep quality and monitoring sleep performance can enhance health, decrease the risk of drowsy driving and boost learning abilities.

“Our vision of digitalisation is to provide technology on a system level in order to improve people’s lives,” said Jan-Hendrik Sewing, senior vice president at Infineon (www.infineon.com). “We offer our new Xensiv sleep quality service as a cost-effective option that helps OEMs rapidly build new products and focus on increasing the quality of their customers’ sleep.”

The service automatically recognises and adapts to a person’s natural sleep rhythm to help improve their sleep quality and provide the information necessary for intelligent management of, for example, adaptive lighting, heating, cooling and air quality. Key features include sleep measurement distinguishing between asleep and awake, total sleep time, sleep efficiency, time to fall asleep and number of wake events.

It can detect sleep stages such as REM or non-REM and respiratory factors including anomalous changes in breathing intensity.

As part of Infineon’s broader sensing-as-a-service (SEaaS) approach to accelerate OEMs’ time to market, the Xensiv sleep quality service (www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/sleep-quality-service) provides a managed, end-to-end option consisting of sense, compute and connect hardware, associated firmware, and a cloud-based service to process and analyse data from millions of users globally.

OEMs can adopt the service by integrating the required hardware components into their end device and integrating the service cloud option into their web infrastructure and mobile application. OEMs ship the end product directly to end users and retain ownership of the user relationship and data. Onboarding is straightforward for end users and, once completed, they can check all information related to their sleeping behaviour via the OEM.