There is little that will put a stop to a restful night's sleep faster than sharing a bed with a snorer. To tackle the issue, Motion Pillow has come up with a self-inflating, AI-powered smart pillow, and it has been making waves at CES 2024.
If the idea of an inflatable pillow puts you in mind of a rock-hard camping pillow, fear not – this one's made from memory foam, like many of today's best pillows. Various iterations of the Motion Pillow have been exhibited at CES in previous years, but its unique tech has earned it a 'Best of Innovation' award at the 2024 event.
So how exactly does it work? There are three parts: the Motion System unit that sits near your bed, the pillow itself, and a companion app.
The Motion System Unit uses AI to distinguish snores from the noise of, say, a passing tractor, so the system doesn't end up responding to every minor nocturnal disturbance.
If it identifies the sound as definitely a snore, the pillow itself is activated. It will slowly inflate, causing the sleeper's head to turn to the side – a sleep position that opens the airways and is much less likely to induce snoring. The inflation process is designed to be quiet and gentle, to cause as little disruption as possible, and you can adjust the height to which the pillow inflates to suit the sleeper's build.
The whole thing is operated via a companion app (available for Apple and Android). As well as using it to adjust settings, the app will also provide you with data around how long you were snoring for and how often the pillow had to intervene to keep you quiet. And if you want an insight into your partner's experience of spending the night with you, it'll even play back a recording of your snoring sounds for you.
Things look pretty positive on the comfort front too. The stuffing is made from high-density foam (this is the best type of memory foam, although Motion Pillow doesn't actually specify density, so we can't make a definitive call about the quality). It also comes with a CertiPUR-US certification, which means it meets certain minimum health and environmental standards. There's a selection of different colored pillowcases to suit your bedroom decor.
The gadget comes with some impressive looking stats from its clinical tests. Almost 94 per cent of trial participants snored less when using the motion pillow. Given how many people this affects, there's a surprising lack of good snore-preventing solutions – are intelligently inflating pillows about to change all that?
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