The lamp that watches you sleep – and might finally fix it

Your bedroom is full of sleep data. SomnoSphere is the first device built to read it

A student-designed bedside lamp uses radar and thermal imaging to track your sleep without touching you – and it could redefine how we think about rest in a continent that has quietly declared sleep a public health emergency.

In 1942, the average person slept eight hours a night. Today, that figure has collapsed to around 6.8 hours – and the slide shows no sign of reversing. A YouGov study conducted across 17 countries in 2024 found that while northern Europeans fare relatively better than most, even Germany and Denmark – the best performers on the continent – see roughly one in three adults sleeping less than the recommended minimum. In France, Spain, and the UK, the situation is noticeably worse. Globally, about 62% of adults report problems with sleep quality, and more than half say they consistently get less rest than they need. The consequences extend well beyond grogginess. Researchers have calculated that insufficient sleep costs just the U.S. economy more than $200 billion annually in lost productivity, with Germany and Japan each surrendering tens of billions more. Workers with chronic insomnia symptoms miss an average of 14 days of work per year and underperform for another 30. A 2024 systematic review estimated that between 30% and 35% of adults worldwide experience clinically significant insomnia: a figure that, applied to global population data, represents hundreds of millions of people. Let’s recap it:

• 6.8h average nightly sleep today, down from 8h in 1942
• 62% of adults worldwide report problems with sleep quality
• $411B lost annually just by the U.S. economy, to sleep deprivation

What makes this crisis particularly hard to address is that most of the damage is invisible. You don’t always know you woke up. You don’t feel yourself surface from deep sleep into a lighter stage and drift back down. The environmental triggers –  a room that warms two degrees, a sound spike at 3am, a light bleeding under the door – register in your body without registering in your memory. Standard sleep medicine addresses this through polysomnography, an overnight clinical study involving electrodes and sensors attached across the body. It works, but it is expensive, uncomfortable, and inaccessible to almost everyone. “The issue with most sleep trackers is the same as the issue with trying to sleep in an unfamiliar bed: the device itself becomes the disturbance.”

A lamp that watches without waking you

SomnoSphere, a device developed as a submission to Hackster’s Sensor Fusion Challenge, proposes a different paradigm. It sits on your nightstand like an ordinary bedside lamp. It asks nothing of you – no strap to fasten, no ring to remember, no charging ritual to complete before bed. It simply watches. The watching, however, is remarkably sophisticated. The device’s two most important sensors are a DFRobot C1001 60 GHz millimeter-wave radar – the same technology used in automotive collision detection – and an MLX90640 infrared thermal camera. The radar detects the subtle movements of your chest as you breathe and shift; the thermal camera reads the heat signature your body emits across the mattress. Together, they give SomnoSphere enough information to classify your sleep state in real time: awake, in REM sleep, or in deep slow-wave sleep, all without a single electrode or contact point on your skin.

SomnoSphere is powered by

• Arduino UNO R4DF
• Robot C1001 60 GHz mmWave radarMLX90640 thermal camera
• Temperature sensor
• Light sensor
• Noise sensor
• Edge Impulse AI model

The remaining sensors handle environmental monitoring: temperature, ambient light, and noise. All of it flows into an Edge Impulse AI model running locally on the Arduino, which classifies your sleep state and flags anomalies. By morning, you have a timeline – sleep cycles plotted against the room conditions at each moment – that can make patterns visible that would otherwise stay hidden for years.

The actionable insight is the point. If every time the room temperature rises slightly you briefly wake, SomnoSphere will show you that correlation. The fix might be as straightforward as setting the thermostat to maintain a consistent overnight temperature – a small change, but one you’d have no reason to make without the data to justify it. The device also helps you wake up each morning, using its awareness of your sleep stage to choose a gentler moment for an alarm. This positions SomnoSphere squarely within the fastest-growing segment of the sleep technology market. While wearables — smartwatches, rings, and fitness bands — still command roughly 76% of a global market valued at around $25 billion in 2024, the non-wearable category is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of over 20% through 2034, outpacing everything else in the space. Devices that track contactlessly, whether via under-mattress sensors, radar, or camera, are attracting both consumer interest and serious investment. The appeal is obvious: comfort at night is not a nice-to-have, it is the prerequisite for everything else to work.

Europe catches up – in awareness, if not yet in access

The European sleep tech market is expected to register among the fastest growth rates globally over the next decade, driven by rising health consciousness, expanding digital health infrastructure, and a slowly shifting policy environment. A 2024 position paper signed by sleep and mental health experts across Europe, the UK, Switzerland, and Canada called explicitly for national health systems to recognize chronic insomnia as a chronic disorder and ensure consistent access to evidence-based treatment – a step most European countries have yet to take formally. In that context, a low-cost, open-hardware device that gives any person actionable sleep data from their own bedroom has a particular resonance. SomnoSphere is not a commercial product, and it arrives without the privacy architecture or clinical validation of a regulated medical device. But it demonstrates clearly that the underlying technology — radar, thermal imaging, edge AI — is accessible enough to be built by a single developer on a student budget, and good enough to be genuinely useful. The global sleep crisis is real, well-documented, and stubbornly resistant to simple solutions. A lamp that watches you sleep and hands you the evidence in the morning will not solve it alone. But it represents exactly the kind of lateral thinking the problem needs – not more things to wear, but smarter environments to sleep in.