Sleep

​Most alarm clocks are designed to get people out of bed, but there are scenarios where you'd like one to keep them in. The Mella kids clock is designed to achieve by using a mix of lights and facial expressions to enlighten toddlers about the bliss of sleeping in.

People can be pretty picky about their pillows. Not only do folks prefer a different softness-to-support ratio, but that preference can change night to night. Now, a French startup has developed the Wopilo, an indecisive-sleeper’s dream pillow that’s soft on one side and firm on the other.

It's hard to resist the temptation of the snooze button some mornings, but a masochistic new alarm clock may help you kick the habit. When the AlarmShock goes off, you have two minutes to unlock a wrist-worn bracelet and dock it on the device – or face an electric shock.

As more and more devices bathe our eyes in blue light at night, our sleep patterns will be disturbed and it's even possible that some cancer risks might increase​. So what to do? Do blue-light-blocking glasses, screens and filters do anything to help?​ We asked an expert to find out.

For Studio Banana Things, what started off as a faintly absurd idea for helping people to sleep on the go has turned into a fourth successfully crowdfunded product. The new Ostrich Pillow Go is a travel pillow of varying thickness to ensure users can find a comfy head position when snoozing.

When a New Atlas writer was offered the chance to try a pillow that promised to play one sound that could drown out the others in his head, he happily accepted. But did the Dreampad pillow really help?​ Let's just say it was a real snoozer.

A white noise machine or app can be a handy bedside companion for insomniacs. Cambridge Sound claims it has a better option with Nightingale, a new IoT-enabled system that uses two speakers placed around a room to create a “sound blanket,” which blends into the background and blocks incoming sound.

Most of us don't have a great relationship with our alarm clocks, given that their sole purpose is essentially to scream at us until we get up. The new Kello smart alarm clock, however, is designed to help us sleep better, snooze less and wake up earlier, all using a gentle approach.

The evolution of the humble travel pillow shows the lengths to which we will go for sleep. The Ostrich Pillow and the Woollip are among the greats where sacrificing dignity for dozing is concerned, but the new NodPod must be commended for its radical "head hammock" approach.

The Smartress is a mattress with an inbuilt "lover detection system" that uses an array of sensors to measure the duration and intensity of any, er, activity undertaken on it, and notifies your phone if anything suspicious is going on.

The recent launch of Rythm and the introduction of its Dreem device adds a new approach to combatting poor sleep, by detecting when a sleeper is in a deep sleep state and maintaining that state through the use of sound.​

Resembling a regular sleep mask, the Neuroon is a wireless device that connects to a dedicated mobile app for Android or iOs and monitors your brain waves, analyzes your sleep patterns, and uses bright light therapy to help improve sleep quality for those who have trouble falling or staying asleep.