Tag Archives: sleep assist

The $170 Clock That Wants You Off Your Phone at Night

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Most of us fall asleep holding the very thing that’s keeping us awake. The phone. The infinite scroll. The algorithm engineered to make you feel like you’re missing something if you put it down. It’s a strange modern paradox, that a device built for connection has become the dominant object in one of the most intimate spaces in our home: the bedroom. Hatch seems to have understood this better than most, and their Restore 3 is a quiet but deliberate argument for doing things differently.

On paper, it’s a smart sleep clock. A well-designed one, yes, but still, at its core, a bedside device that helps you fall asleep and wake up. What makes it worth talking about isn’t necessarily the specs, though they’re solid. It’s the philosophy behind it. The entire product is built around the idea of putting your phone down, and keeping it that way.

Designer: Hatch

That’s where the redesigned hardware comes in. Unlike its predecessor, the Restore 3 has five physical controls: three on top, including a pause button, an Unwind Swap button, and what Hatch calls the Big Button, plus two more on the sides for the bedside light and alarm toggle. You can swap your wind-down routine, adjust volume, and silence your alarm without ever picking up your phone. It sounds minor until you realize how reflexively most of us grab the phone the second the alarm goes off, then somehow lose forty minutes to Instagram before we’ve brushed our teeth.

The design itself is clean and restrained in a way that feels intentional. Compact at roughly 7.24 inches wide and just over 5 inches tall, it comes in three muted colorways: Putty, Greige, and Cocoa. None of them scream “tech product.” All of them could pass for a ceramic lamp or a minimalist decor piece, which is likely the point. It’s designed to disappear into your nightstand while doing a lot of work. The time display is almost comically understated, barely noticeable at a glance.

Where the Restore 3 earns its $169.99 price tag is in the routines. Hatch structures your night into three stages: unwind, sleep, wake. During the unwind phase, you can cycle through immersive light and audio experiences, including meditations, bedtime podcasts, sleep soundscapes, and layered ambient sounds. The sleep phase takes over from there, and in the morning, a gradually brightening sunrise alarm eases you out of sleep rather than yanking you out of it. You set all of this through the companion app and then, ideally, never touch your phone again until morning.

The optional Hatch+ subscription, at five dollars a month or fifty for the year, unlocks over 100 sounds and lighting programs, with new content added regularly. A 30-day trial comes included with every purchase, which is a smart way to explore the full library before committing. Without the subscription, you still get access to more than 20 alarm sounds and 12 color noise options, which is genuinely more than most people will ever cycle through.

A few caveats worth naming: the Restore 3 doesn’t track your sleep. No biometric sensors, no data scores, no readiness analysis to scroll through every morning. For some, that’s a dealbreaker. Personally, I think it’s a feature. Sleep culture has gotten strangely clinical, with people waking up to check scores and percentages before they’ve had coffee. The Restore 3 isn’t interested in quantifying your rest. It just tries to improve it.

It’s also worth noting that the sunset mode, which winds down the lighting at night, isn’t as gradual as some competing sunrise alarms. If you’re particularly sensitive to light cues, that’s a real consideration. Still, the Restore 3 gets far more right than it gets wrong. It’s a thoughtfully designed product in a category that tends toward the overly clinical or the embarrassingly basic. The fact that it actually looks good on your nightstand while doing something genuinely useful puts it in a rare category. Sometimes the best tech is the kind that quietly asks you to use less of it.

The post The $170 Clock That Wants You Off Your Phone at Night first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Sleep Tracker That Solves the “Creepy Gadget” Problem With Soft Forms and Invisible Sensing

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A device that watches you sleep should, by all rights, feel invasive. Wellune, the sleep health monitor concept from Korean tech company Bitsensing, somehow doesn’t. Designed by Adaption Design Studio’s Deokhee Jeong, Youngnam Lee, and Aran Hwang, this is a product that understands something most health tech still gets wrong: if you want people to invite a sensor into their bedroom, it had better not look like one.

Wellune looks like a small, sculptural lamp. A slender white stem curves upward from a flat circular base, blooming into a soft, rounded head that sits somewhere between a sprouting bud and a modernist desk light. The head detaches magnetically, which is a lovely detail because it turns setup into something almost playful. You hold this smooth, egg-like dome in your hand, place it on the stem, and it clicks into position with a satisfying connection. There’s no clinical quality to it, no blinking LED arrays demanding your attention, no aggressive futurism. It just sits on your nightstand looking like a piece of Scandinavian-inflected Korean design, which is exactly what it is.

Designers: Deokhee Jeong, Youngnam Lee, Aran Hwang

But underneath that calm exterior is some genuinely impressive engineering. Wellune uses 60GHz millimeter-wave radar to detect your breathing patterns and even carotid artery movements while you sleep, all without any physical contact. Every 15 seconds, it captures biometric signals and sleep respiration data, then runs that information through an AI system trained against hospital-grade polysomnography databases. The radar waves reflect off skin without penetrating tissue, so there’s no wearable discomfort, no chest straps, no adhesive patches peeling off at 3 AM.

What makes this concept compelling is the problem it’s designed to solve. Traditional sleep studies are expensive, inconvenient, and almost comically bad at capturing how you actually sleep. Being wired up in an unfamiliar clinical environment and told to “sleep naturally” is a contradiction that anyone who’s undergone the experience can attest to. Wellune’s vision is continuous, 24/7 passive monitoring in your own bedroom, night after night, building a longitudinal picture of your sleep health that a single-night study simply can’t match. The companion app would deliver daily reports covering metrics like breathing disturbance frequency and patterns that might correlate with conditions ranging from sleep apnea to early warning signs associated with dementia. The system is also designed to be flexible, customizable based on installation location, the number of devices in use, and individual mode settings, so it could adapt to different bedroom configurations and personal health needs.

The industrial design decisions here are worth lingering on, beyond the feature set. The all-white colorway and matte finish feel deliberate in a way that goes beyond aesthetics. This is a device designed to disappear into a bedroom environment, to become furniture rather than technology. The curved stem avoids the rigidity you see in most health monitoring equipment. It has an organic quality, like a plant leaning toward light, and that metaphor feels intentional for something meant to live beside your bed.

The magnetic detachment system for the sensor head is worth noting too. From the product images, you can see the head lifts cleanly off the stem, revealing a small metallic connection point. This suggests the head might be repositionable or adjustable in orientation, allowing you to aim the radar sensor optimally depending on your bed setup. It’s the kind of thoughtful mechanical detail that separates considered product design from pure engineering exercises.

As a concept, Wellune raises genuinely interesting questions about where health monitoring is headed. The path from prototype to bedroom nightstand involves real hurdles, including data privacy, clinical validation, and regulatory approval, but the vision is coherent and the direction is clear. What Adaption Design Studio has proposed is something that manages to be simultaneously a piece of sophisticated radar technology and a quiet, beautiful object you wouldn’t mind looking at every morning when you wake up. That’s a harder balance to strike than it sounds, and as a concept, they’ve already pulled off the hardest part: making you want it to exist.

The post A Sleep Tracker That Solves the “Creepy Gadget” Problem With Soft Forms and Invisible Sensing first appeared on Yanko Design.

Bedside lava lamp concept improves sleep with white noise, warm lights

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People are finally realizing that sleep actually plays an important role in productivity and shouldn’t be sacrificed for its sake. Unfortunately, many people by now have acquired one sleeping disorder or another, or at the very least have developed poor habits that lead to poor-quality sleep. There are plenty of methods being offered these days, from supplements to meditation to aromas, but sometimes the simplest solution is to use our body’s natural faculties to induce sleep and correct bad practices. That’s the kind of answer that this concept lamp tries to give, using light and sound to lull our minds and bodies to a more peaceful slumber and an even more refreshing awakening.

Designer: Alessandro Pennese

There are plenty of reasons why we have trouble sleeping in this day and age, but most of them boil down to our habits and lifestyles. Many of us flood our eyes with harmful blue light from our phones even while lying in bed, or let our ears be hammered by noise and distractions. Supplements rely on chemical changes to the body, which might be effective in the short term but could do more harm than good in the long run. Meditation is a good habit to develop in any context, but it only goes so far into actually inducing a physical change in our bodies.

EPY is a lamp concept that tries to trigger those changes by using white noise and warm lights. White noise has been known to be effective in canceling out ambient noise that could be keeping our brains active, using sounds from nature to lull our minds to sleep. Warm light, which is closer to natural light, also soothes the eyes and helps generate melatonin, mimicking the setting sun’s gentle glow that signals our bodies to slow down as well.

This lava lamp-like design encourages the user to develop good sleeping habits in order to help repair and rejuvenate their bodies. But although good sleep is important, waking up properly is also a significant factor in a good day. Like the sun at dawn, that same warm light helps our body slowly wake up in a more graceful and peaceful manner, ensuring that we’re ready to face the day full of energy and zest each time.

EPY’s very design is also meant to evoke a sense of calm with its minimalist aesthetic and simple controls. The translucent cap of the lamp acts as a timer when you twist it, letting you set the time of playback for up to 45 minutes. Hidden at the bottom of the lamp are two dials, one for setting how long you intend to sleep while the other sets the volume of the white noise playback. It doesn’t have complicated features, nor does it require you to reach for your phone, which would defeat the entire purpose of getting you to sleep swiftly and peacefully.

The post Bedside lava lamp concept improves sleep with white noise, warm lights first appeared on Yanko Design.