Last year, Shenzhen-based Sleepace let us test drive their RestOn smart sleep monitor to gauge the quality of our sleep. Aside from a few design quirks and a single major bug (which has since been fixed), we thought the accuracy, features, as well as personalized advice and action plans in the RestOn made it a cool device.
Since the release of the RestOn, Sleepace has come full circle with the release of the Nox, a smart sleep light that can help you fall asleep more easily and wake up more naturally. Nox can be used on its own, or in our situation, integrated with the RestOn to form a complete Nox Sleep System. Since we’ve previously reviewed the RestOn, and it hasn’t had any hardware changes, we’ll focus our review on just the Nox sleep light.
Design and Hardware
With its rounded edges and simple, modern design, Nox can be an attractive addition to any style bedroom. The clean white upper two-thirds of the Nox is the light itself, while the gray, lower third contains a simple display. The display, which only shows the time and a wireless connection icon, blends softly with the Nox’s gray housing and completely vanishes when the display turns off. It’s simple, but not harsh like the the bright red or green 7-segment numerical LED displays of our “dumb” digital clocks. The top of the Nox consists of five touch-sensitive buttons that turn it on and off, control the speaker volume, and adjust the brightness of the light. It’s a nice design, but the lack of tactile feedback sometimes made it difficult to know if our finger touches were being registered. On the back is the speaker grille, power jack, and a USB jack for charging your mobile devices.
Use
In the majority of cases, Nox will be controlled with the Sleepace app. As a light, you can choose the brightness as well as the full spectrum of colors. As a sleep light, Nox has a feature called “Sleep-Aid Mode” which allows you to select the brightness and tone of red light (said to raise the secretion of melatonin) as well as soothing background music to help you fall asleep faster. A programmable smart alarm will gently wake you up with white light and music designed to act kind of like a sunrise.
If you’re using the RestOn bed sensor, the smart alarm will wake you up when it detects that you’re at the lightest point of your sleep so you wake up more refreshed. Both the sleep aid and smart alarms seemed to work well for us, although the sleep aid will take a bit of tweaking to determine at what point the light and sounds go from soothing to distracting.
We should also add that Nox provides additional insights to what could be affecting your sleep: hidden sensors measure room temperature, humidity, light, and noise levels. Pretty nifty!
Likes:
- Simple and attractive design
- We didn’t snooze through the smart alarm!
- Additional sensors measure temperature, humidity, light, and noise levels
Dislikes:
- Not as useful if you don’t own the RestOn sleep monitor
- Would be nice if the built-in speaker could play more than built-in background sounds
- Still not sure if our sleep has improved
Conclusion
While we’ve yet to conclude whether or not our sleep has actually improved with the addition of the Nox, we did find ourselves waking up to the light’s smart alarm feature, which is a nice change from our iPhone’s rude klaxon tone. And while we’re still trying to learn how humidity, temperature, light, and noise levels are affecting our sleep, these measurements are an interesting feature.
In terms of additional utility, the Nox isn’t much more than a light. The USB jack was hit-or-miss in terms of being able to charge our devices, and, as the Nox features Bluetooth 4.0, we would have liked to use the rear speaker to play our own music. At $149, Nox is cheaper than its main competition, the Withings Aura, but more expensive than standalone “smart lightbulbs” that can have similar functionality through a smartphone app. But, if you’re struggling to get a good night’s sleep this summer, Nox may be just the thing.
Link to purchase Sleepace Nox on Amazon…
More info: Sleepace Nox