Google’s new Nest Hub shows how well you slept last night

Google announced a new version of its Nest Hub smart display. The updated Nest Hub includes several improvements over the model that debuted as Home Hub in 2018, including a refined design, faster processor and taller speaker. But the most significant update is found in your ability to measure your sleep without requiring you to use anything. The new Nest Hub costs $ 99.99, comes in four colors and will be delivered on March 30, with pre-orders starting today, March 16.

The new Nest Hub looks basically identical to the previous model, but now you can get it in a light blue color (Google calls it “fog”), in addition to the options of light pink, light gray and dark gray. Google says it has refined the frame around the screen to be in line with the rest of the frame, which should make cleaning easier. The screen itself remains unchanged – it is a 7-inch, 1024 x 600 pixel, 7-inch touchscreen LCD with Google’s automatic ambient brightness and color adjustment features. There’s still no camera on the Nest Hub – if you want to make video calls from a smart Google display, you’ll need to buy a larger Nest Hub Max.

Google claims that the new Nest Hub has 50% better bass performance thanks to a larger speaker (now up to 43.5 mm in diameter), meeting one of our biggest complaints with the original model. A third microphone and a machine learning chip on the device have been added to improve your response to voice commands. Google says that Nest Hub will now learn its common commands over time and then process them locally to speed up responses as well. Inside the new Hub is a faster processor and a Thread radio for smart home devices. Google told me that the Thread function is not available at startup, but when enabled, it will allow Nest Hub to behave like a Thread edge router and a CHIP hub, with support for compatible devices.

Image: Google

These hardware improvements are appreciated, but the biggest difference between the old model and the new one is Nest Hub’s ability to track your sleep patterns and assess your sleep quality. The new Hub does this thanks to the integrated Soli sensor technology, which can measure your movements at night, even your breathing patterns. The company has been trying to find the right use for Soli technology since it debuted on the Pixel 4 smartphone in 2019. Since reaffirming its commitment to technology last year, Google has used Soli on the Nest thermostat and now the latest Nest iteration. Hub.

Google takes the data captured by the Soli sensors, combines it with its sleep schedule and routines and analyzes it to provide a summary of its duration, consistency and sleep rest. He is able to do all of this without requiring you to place special devices under the mattress or wear a tracker on your wrist. It can also track your sleep automatically – no need to tell you when you go to bed or when you wake up.

The data presented by Nest Hub tells you how long you slept, how consistent you are with the times you go to bed and when you wake up and an overall rest score. It identifies when you coughed or snored at night, as well as when you got out of bed. Google says there is a setting when you first install Nest Hub next to the bed to tell you exactly where you sleep, so that it can ignore your partner’s movement if you share a bed with someone else.

Google says it is not evaluating its sleep cycle patterns (such as deep, light or REM) at this time, but does not rule out doing so in the future. Other popular sleep tracking devices often include this information in their reports, although the accuracy of it remains under debate. “I tend to trust when devices can tell me someone is awake, verses when someone is asleep,” said Susheel Patil, clinical director of the Johns Hopkins Pulmonary Sleep Medicine Program The Verge last autumn. “But I don’t put much emphasis on differentiating between light sleep and deep sleep.”

Google tested Nest’s ability to accurately track when someone was sleeping and when they were awake, comparing it to the type of sleep study done in laboratories and clinics, called polysomnography, on 33 volunteers. “This is the gold standard we use in the clinical community,” says Logan Schneider, a sleep researcher at Stanford University who consulted on the project.

Nest also measures respiration rate, which is also compared to polysomnography. In addition, the team measured breathing rates captured by other medical devices, such as bands that people can wear while sleeping, said Schneider The Verge.

Nest Hub also uses other sensors to tell you what may be affecting your sleep, including room brightness and room temperature. Sleep trackers worn on the wrist are generally not able to measure these data points, which gives Nest Hub a small advantage when it comes to context.

Image: Google

Google says that the motion data captured by the Soli sensor is represented by spectrograms, which show the intensity of the movement during the night. It is not individually identifiable and the captured audio and raw data are processed locally on the device itself. Google sends what it calls “sleep event data,” which includes the time you went to bed, the time you woke up, coughing and resting for the cloud. You can view this data in the Hub itself, by tapping the screen or using a voice command to ask how you slept, or in the Google Fit app on a smartphone.

A bedside monitor like Nest has advantages over a sleep tracking device worn on the wrist – users don’t have to deal with the discomfort of sleeping with a strapped device on and they don’t have to remember to carry it around before they go to sleep. This could provide people with more consistent data about their sleep, rather than just information about the nights they decide to wear a smartwatch. Collecting this information over time is also an advantage over medical examinations, which are often invasive and only take a snapshot of someone’s sleep in a night or two. “You are collecting more data to get a more realistic snapshot of what a person’s sleep is like every night,” says Schneider.

For now, Google says that Nest cannot diagnose any sleep-related medical conditions. It is a general wellness device, but like many health tracking products, it is not a medical device. But this is something that could happen in the future, said Ashton Udall, product manager at Google The Verge during a briefing. “Coughing and snoring, obviously, can really be indicators of more serious conditions,” he says. “We think there is a very rich future in being able to give people more insights.”

Google says it has partnered with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) to provide guidance on how to improve users’ sleep, which are provided in the Fit smartphone app. It will give suggestions on how you can sleep better based on your own data, including the tried and tested “go to bed at the same time every night”, as well as smart home routines and reminders about when to go to sleep. After 14 nights, the Hub will present a recommended time for when to go to sleep and when to wake up.

Outside of sleep monitoring, Nest Hub also uses the Soli sensor to allow for some basic gestures, such as “touching the air” to play or pause music or video. You can also wave your hand over the device to postpone the alarm.

Google says sleep detection features will be available as a free preview to all Nest Hub owners until next year. The company has not said how much resources can cost when the preview period ends, but is working on integrating Nest Hub’s sleep tracking with Fitbit’s existing sleep tracking capabilities.

Sleep monitoring devices have gained popularity in recent years, with most smartwatches and fitness bracelets offering this feature. Google’s bet that Nest Hub’s sleep monitoring, which doesn’t require you to wear anything, doesn’t carry anything and even says you’re going to sleep, will make it easier for people to use consistently. It also provides a little more context than the average, thanks to its luminance and temperature monitoring. But the question is still whether all this data can lead you to improve your sleep in a practical way or if it’s just more noise in a noisy world.