Samsung wants you to put a motion tracker under a loved one's mattress—what could go wrong?

By Kashmir Hill | September 4, 2015 | 2:13pm

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It seems that we’re on a mission to make every object in the world “smart,” granting trashcans, wine bottles and socks the ability to collect data about us and report it back to companies for analysis. The latest household item to get a spying upgrade is your bed. Samsung announced “Sleepsense” this week:

Samsung SleepSense is easy to use: simply place the sensor under your mattress, download the SleepSense app to your mobile, connect the two, drift off to sleep, andSleepSense gets to work.

Samsung says the “real-time contactless sensor” will collect and analyze your heart rate, breathing and movements, and then will send you a summary of your sleep in the morning along with a score. Samsung claims the white, circular plate is able to do these precise readings through a mattress with 97% accuracy. Beyond improving sleep, the appeal would be that the device could detect when you were asleep and then turn off your lights and TV.

Help the ones you love

For people concerned that their loved ones – for example elderly family members – suffer from a lack of sleep, SleepSense can help: simply put the sensor under their mattress and select the app’s ‘family care’ option to receive an analysis of the quality of their sleep via email.

Wonderful! An undetectable motion sensor you can put under someone else’s bed that will email you a report of their nighttime activity.

The SleepSense hasn’t officially hit the market yet, but we can start the countdown now to the first time a suspicious partner uses it as a cutting-edge cheating detector.