Hello (the company not the word), is a Silicon Valley-based startup that has made over $2.4 billion on Kickstarter since launching it's sleep-monitoring product called Sense. Several generous investors, including ex-PayPal director David Marcus, Facebook executive Dan Rose, and Xiaomi executive Hugo Barra, have also supported the device by supplying an additional $10.5 million to the company. Scott Bartlett, head of Google Nexus's phone program, is now the director of Hello's hardware department. He says Sense is a new category of “smart” device, that aims to solve the problem by looking at it in an entirely different way.

The problem is sleep disruption, and looking at it differently means “understanding yourself as a person and how to make yourself a better person”, says Bartlett. Over 70 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders, and besides getting all wired up, paying the docs a ton of cash to diagnose and medicate you, how bout an alternative choice? What about letting a little high tech ball take a good a look at your sleeping environment to better understand what the disturbances are?

Sense is a little device, about the size of a plum, that contains sensors for detecting various types of sleep problems. Its counterpart is a small disc called the “Pill”, which attaches to your pillow and tracks your movement during sleep. From noise, light, humidity, temperature, and even allergens in the air (nasal allergies affect more than 50 million people), being able to monitor sleep behavior via environmental factors could completely change the quality of a night of ZZZ's. In order to measure these factors, Sense includes “an ambient light sensor, high-sensitivity microphone, temperature sensor, high-quality speaker, proximity sensor, particulate sensor, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity”. It even “reinvents” the alarm by tracking the perfect spot in your sleep cycle to gently wake you up.

Sense's accompanying smartphone app gives you a “Sleep Score” each night after taking all of the sensor data and variables it can muster into account. The company says it can “tell the difference between falling asleep, sleeping soundly, thrashing around, and waking up”. The product runs for $99 as a pre-order price, and will retail for $129.