Nate Lanxon

Withings wants to help you sleep better, and it wants you to do so by joining you in bed.

More specifically, it wants its new Aura sensor to get under your mattress. This small, soft device will spend the night subtly reading your body's movements, breathing patterns and heart rate. A companion device -- essentially a lamp with an embedded speaker -- rests on your bedside, monitoring the noise and light in your bedroom. Paired to an iPhone, the Aura system knows how well (or poorly) you sleep, and can begin to help you understand why.


It will also aim to determine the optimum time in the morning to wake you, and does so using light (from the lamp) and sound (from the lamp's speaker). The same works in reverse to help you fall asleep peacefully.

After gathering data over a series of nights, the iPhone app presents data to show how irregular your sleeping is. Do you always wake up after a couple of hours? Are you tossing and turning all night? Is your heart rate too quick while you're sleeping?

It's a system that will seem familiar to anyone who has used the popular Sleep Cycle app. This app -- with so many downloads it scored ninth place in Apple's list of the most popular iPhone apps of 2013 -- rests under a pillow and uses the phone's sensors to monitor sleep, then wake you at the right moment.

But Withings is confident its interpretation of the so-called "bio-alarm clock" is better thanks to its unique sensor and its pairing with a dedicated lamp and alarm system. It's difficult to test on-site at a trade show (there are very few "test beds" available on the CES show floor, and even fewer you'd want to fall asleep in) so we'll hold our breath for our full review later in the year.

Withings is heading for UK beddings in the spring for around £200.