Your strangest bedfellow might be the mattress itself.
There have been numerous stories about smart tech like Oura rings alerting wearers to health troubles — including several who said it detected early signs of cancer.
But one 70-year-old man was alerted to his own serious heart issue thanks to a warning message from his smart bed.
According to a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the bed apparently alerted the man to his uncharacteristically slow heart beat, which it had been tracking the night before.
Cardiologist James Ip, of Weill Cornell Medical College and New York–Presbyterian Hospital, explained in the report that once the man received the alert, he cross-checked the bed’s numbers with data from a smartwatch and a home blood pressure machine, confirming his heart was beating dangerously slow, a condition also known as bradycardia.
Noting some shortness of breath, the man called his doctor, who directed him to head to the emergency room.
The man had a history of hypertension and coronary artery disease. The average heart rate his bed had registered the night before was 42 beats per minute (BPM), which is just above the rate associated with severe bradycardia and well below his typical nighttime rate of 72.
A normal rate is somewhere between 60 and 100 BPM.
At the ER, doctors found his heart rate had dropped another couple beats. They then administered an electrocardiogram (EKG) test, which produced disturbing results: the man had a complete heart block, also known as a third-degree atrioventricular block, with an abnormal rhythm.
Such a severe block like that happens when the cardiac conduction system fails, cutting the atria off from the ventricles and triggering bradycardia.
The prognosis for an untreated complete heart block is not good — most often resulting in cardiac arrest or heart failure.
Luckily for this man, his mattress ensured he was treated in time. Doctors were able to insert a pacemaker, a typical treatment for a complete heart block, and “the patient’s symptoms abated.”
The life-saving smart bed was embedded with a ballistocardiogram, which measured his heart rate and detected the abnormal pace. The non-invasive technology can estimate things like heart rate, and is sensitive enough to pick up on the tiniest movements.
There’s an uptick in similar products already on the market or hitting it soon, from beds to watches to T-shirts. And while they won’t be able to diagnose medical conditions, they do increasingly have the capacity to alert wearers of something suspicious that should be discussed with a human doctor.
Speaking to Gizmodo, Ip was optimistic about the future of these wearable technologies.
“Increasing awareness of these tools can help patients and clinicians manage cardiac arrhythmias based on wearable-directed medical care,” he said.
Elsewhere in the report, Ip noted that asymptomatic bradycardia is common during sleep, but symptoms like shortness of breath definitely warrant a visit to the doctor.
The old saying may not be true that there’s nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix — but at least this man knows his bed’s got his back.
