Hardware

The Smart Bed: The First Among Many Things Due for a Tech Makeover

Spanish furniture company OHEA is selling a bed that makes itself. What else could use smartening up?

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Ricky publishes and manages the content on BizTech magazine's website. He's a writer, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all-around digital guy.

Now we’re really living in a Jetsons world. Spanish furniture company OHEA announced that it will be selling the first smart bed.

Which, in this case, means a bed that makes itself. With this invention, everyone could get back at least five more minutes in his or her day. Moms would have one less thing to nag their kids about, and technology would create one more way to be efficient.

You can check out a video of the smart bed in action, below.

The Smart Bed does come with caveats, of course. Digital Trends highlighted a few in a recent report on the device:

[A]n owner can’t use third party bedding and it doesn’t appear to accommodate a second top sheet between the main blanket and the bottom sheet. That sheet is attached to the mattress with a Velcro strip.

And for those concerned that the bed-making mode will activate while they’re still in the bed, OHEA officials say it’s impossible.

There are plenty of areas where this concept could be improved. For example, the spaces on the sides of the bed, added to accommodate all the mechanical arms involved in the automated bed-making, are inelegant. And what about health analytics? Could the bed integrate with technology so that it would measure how well a person sleeps? And why not build Siri-like voice control into it, while we’re at it?

The possibilities are endless. But the Smart Bed is just one of many ordinary things due for a technology upgrade. Technology has transformed the phone into a Swiss Army knife computing device in your pocket and it has altered the notepad into something much more useful with the creation of the tablet. Already, car companies are hard at work trying to figure out how they can turn automobiles into smart cars.

So we can expect more of these innovations as we march onward in the information age. Perhaps big data isn’t just about gathering information from software sources but also about inventing hardware to collect new data altogether.

The big question is: What household item should technology try to improve next?

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