Yesterday, amid announcements of profit surges and the return of much-loved CEO Mr Iwata, gaming legend Nintendo revealed its plans for a non-wearable device, in the form of a sleep monitor.

Back in January the company had said that it was planning to skip wearable technology and go straight to what it called ‘non-wearables’, but refused to give further details.

But now we know more: Nintendo is developing a sleep monitor that will sit next to your bed and track your sleep patterns using radio waves.

You won’t need to wear anything or press anything to get it to work; the device will just sit there and monitor your body movement, respiration and heart rate as you sleep. The data it collects will be uploaded to a cloud server and visualised using technology provided by ResMed, a US-based sleep tech company.

The resulting data will presumably will be available on some kind of app, and, given its Nintendo, probably viewable from a paired Wii U too.

Initial reactions to this product haven’t been that fantastic. There has been a general sense of ‘wacky Nintendo is making more wacky tech’.

However, the product itself is actually a pretty excellent idea, and if people can get over the fact that it is a gaming company making it, it may actually do really well.

Sleep monitoring has really taken off recently; many of us have invested in a fitness monitor, only to discover that the best part of it is the ability to see how well or badly we sleep. Some of us have even used the resulting data to improve our sleep, which is an impressive achievement given how much sleep technology normally robs us of.

However, the fact we have to wear something, usually a wristband, constantly is pretty annoying. When you sleep you want to be as comfortable as possible, and a watch-like device can feel just a bit wrong.

Some even require you to tell them you are about to sleep, which makes accurate daily tracking pretty irritating.

A non-wearable sensor, then, is ideally suited to sleep monitoring. We usually sleep in the same place, so it can live on a bedside table perfectly happily, and not needing to turn it off and on will prevent the use fall-off that wearables often experience.

However, could non-wearable technology that monitors us be useful for other things?

Fitness is probably not going to be a big area given the likely need for a fixed location, but then fitness is about the only thing that wearables have actually got right.

Non-wearables could be far more useful for underexplored types of monitoring.

What about a sensor that sat on your desk at work and kept track of your breaks, procrastination level or snacking habits?

Or one located in the kitchen that would monitor your cooking activity and tell you if you are spending too long browning your onions?

Wearables are fantastic for some things, but let’s face it: you don’t always want to be wearing a bunch of sensors. Maybe non-wearables can explore the areas that wearables have failed in.

Feature image courtesy of david_a_l. First inline image courtesy of Nintendo. Second image courtesy of Misfit.