Google's Nest Hub Wants to Monitor Your Sleep

Google's Nest Hub Wants to Monitor Your Sleep

Google's next internet-connected home device will test whether consumers trust the company enough to let it monitor them while they sleep.

Sleep-sensing technology will be a feature on the newest version of Google's Nest Hub. Like the previous version of the device, the $100 Nest Hub can show pictures and video on its screen, as well as answering questions and helping with tasks around the house through Google's voice assistant. The device doesn't have a camera.

If you allow it, the device will also watch your sleeping patterns from beside your bed. The feature, which Google plans to offer for free for at least this year, relies on a new chip Google calls Soli, which uses radar to detect motion, including a person's breathing.

The Nest Hub will create weekly sleep reports, including the length and quality of the user's sleep, how often they get up at night, and how much they snore and cough. The device will also offer advice developed with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

That kind of help may sound good to people who have trouble sleeping. But it also raises privacy concerns — especially given Google's long history of online surveillance to collect personal details such as interests and locations to help sell digital ads.

The company may also eventually allow the feature to work with its FitBit fitness devices, which Google bought in January for $2.1 billion, raising concerns that the company could use them to more closely monitor people's health.

Google says the Nest Hub's controls will make it clear when sleep tracking is on, and it will be easy to delete data from the device. All audio will be kept on the device, meaning it won't be sent to Google's data centers, although other sleep information will be sent out to create the weekly reports.

The company has promised that none of the information collected through the sleep sensing feature will be used to sell ads.