3 Things You Should Know About Apple’s Acquisition of ‘Beddit’

Beddit, the firm responsible for creating world-renowned sleep monitoring hardware and companion software for iOS, quietly announced this week that it has been acquired by Apple for an undisclosed sum of money. Unlike other high-profile acquisitions, however, Beddit exclusively announced the news to its user-base via a software update to its iOS app. “Beddit has been acquired by Apple,” the company said. “Your personal data will be collected, used and disclosed in accordance with the Apple Privacy Policy.”

Although details surrounding the acquisition and Apple’s intentions are scant at this time, here are a few interesting things we think you should know about Beddit, and its probable implications with a future at Apple:

What Is Beddit?

Beddit’s flagship product is the Beddit 3 Sleep Monitor, which embodies a thin strip of hardware that works in conjunction with a companion app for iOS, primarily to help provide users with the most accurate representation of their sleep patterns. Equipped with force, capacitive touch, humidity, and temperature sensors, the Beddit Sleep Monitor is essentially a strip of material that slips underneath a user’s sheets, and is designed to help track certain elements of sleep including movement, heat, and other biometric data.

What Does Beddit Do?

In conjunction with Beddit’s iOS app, the pad is capable of measuring and relaying vital information to a user’s iPhone, including their heart and breathing rates, in order to provide a holistic, comprehensive analysis of their sleep sessions. The collected sleep data is automatically transmitted to a user’s Bluetooth-connected iPhone, where the variables are broken down into easy-to-understand graphs, so that the user can then get a better idea of their sleep patterns with the ultimate goal of helping them to not only improve the quality of their sleep, but also to identify problematic habits and adjust their environment accordingly.

What’s Next for Beddit?

While Apple has yet to comment on the acquisition, Beddit’s top-brass could ultimately join the health team up in Silicon Valley, potentially working alongside Cupertino’s ever-expanding team of biomedical professionals to help develop future products and/or apps by which users will be able to gain more control of their overall health.

Apple has placed a huge emphasis on health management and technology as it relates to biomedical sciences in recent years, particularly since the release of HealthKit, ResearchKit, CareKit, and the Apple Watch. So It’s likely that Beddit’s sleep-monitoring technology could one day see its way into a new Apple-branded product, such as a future generation of Apple Watch, for example, which could also ship with support for Apple’s revolutionary diabetes monitoring platform.