The Sleeper Stays Still. Everything Around Them Starts Moving: 9 Sleep Patents

What is it?

Hong Jian Technology's patent places a snore detector and a motor-driven mobile seat inside the pillow. When snoring is detected, the mechanism shifts so that the sleeper's head changes from an upward position to an angled posture.

FIG. 5 shows the before-and-after head positions. Rather than asking the sleeper to roll over, the pillow changes position underneath the head.

What is it?

Philips describes a sleep mask with lighting modules over both eyes. The disclosure focuses on a wavelength band of about 490–520 nm so that controlled light can pass through closed eyelids and influence sleep-cycle-related responses.

An ordinary sleep mask blocks outside light. This design blocks ambient light while deliberately adding a controlled light source on the inside.

What is it?

Eight Sleep's patent includes a two-chamber sleep pod in which two people occupy separate enclosed spaces. The disclosure describes regulating environmental conditions, sleeping-surface position, sound, and other characteristics for the individual chambers.

Eight Sleep's current Pod 6 is a real product that independently heats or cools each side of a bed and uses biometric sensing, but it is not the two-chamber enclosure shown here. We have not verified a one-to-one patent-to-product implementation, so the current Pod is shown only as a related direction.

What is it?

This rocking-bed patent mounts the mattress frame on a separate base and drives it with a motor and crank mechanism. FIG. 1 shows the version that pitches the sleeper's head and feet up and down.

The broader disclosure also covers roll, translational movement, vibration, and combinations of motion. Rather than vibrating a small insert, it turns the whole bed frame into the moving mechanism.

What is it?

The patent broadly combines sensing or vision, computing, and bedding manipulators so sheets and blankets can be lifted, pulled, and smoothed automatically. FIG. 3 shows an alternative embodiment in which a roving device moves across the bed surface.

The description goes as far as moving pillows out of the way, arranging the bedding layer by layer, smoothing it, and putting the pillows back. This invention works after sleep rather than during it.

What is it?

Panasonic's patent builds a bed by combining a wheelchair with a bed main body. The wheelchair's segmented surface can flatten and connect with the rest of the bed to make a continuous sleeping surface.

Moving a care recipient from a bed to a wheelchair is physically demanding. This approach changes the object under the person instead: part of the sleeping surface becomes the mobility device.

What is it?

The Digisenz patent does not try to change the snorer. It detects the snoring sound and uses speakers near the headboard to create cancelling sound at the other sleeper's location.

Some embodiments also track head position so the cancellation space can stay aligned with the bed partner's ears as the person moves. The goal is not silence everywhere in the room, but a local quiet zone on the bed.

What is it?

Nintendo's patent describes a base device that can use a Doppler sensor to obtain respiration, pulse, and body-movement information and calculate a sleep state. The same device includes a projector aimed upward.

The disclosure describes sleep-onset content such as a starry sky, waking content, and sleep evaluation. Instead of adding another screen to hold, it turns the ceiling a person already faces in bed into the display surface.

What is it?

This patent gives the sleeping bag two air couplings and connects them to an external Peltier heat-exchanger module with flexible hoses. Conditioned air enters through one hose and returns through the other for recirculation.

A conventional sleeping bag isolates the body from outside weather. This design uses that small enclosed volume as an advantage, conditioning only the air immediately around the sleeper instead of an entire room.