Amazon’s Night-Light Doesn’t Solve My Sleep Problems

In the morning, you get all that information in the accompanying app, including room temperature and humidity levels, and an overall sleep score. The biggest surprise for me was how long I’m actually asleep. Despite being in bed for somewhere around nine or 10 hours, I’m getting only seven or eight hours of sleep. Some nights, there was an obvious issue, like when I woke up two and a half hours after falling asleep and lay there for three hours and 23 minutes before finally dozing off again. Thankfully, that kind of night is rare, and most disturbances were a few minutes of petting my snuggly cats and then closing my eyes again.

Purchasing the $140 Rise gets you a six-month subscription to Halo, Amazon’s health and wellness program. You don’t have to subscribe for any of the sleep data, thankfully, but if you continue with the membership, you can also analyze your body fat and learn how your tone sounds to others (I’ll pass on both), as well as get nutritional plans and recipes. 

Alexa, Go to Bed

Setting up the Halo Rise was easy and the app walks you through the specifics, like facing it toward your upper body at about an arm’s length away. You don’t want anything in between you and the Halo Rise. It didn’t detect my sleeping husband on my other side. I do have cats who are very active at night, but luckily they rarely walk on the edge of the bed and instead opt to annoy both my husband and me at the same time by coming up through the middle. It didn’t seem to affect my data, but it definitely could if your cats or children are more annoying than mine are. 

It’s a sleep tracker first, but it’s also a nice bedside lamp. With just a small arc of actual light, it gets really bright or really dim, depending on what you need. Pressing the smaller button on the top of the device starts a 30-minute sunset simulation for getting yourself ready to doze. The bigger button is the snooze or light control. I don’t love the process of adjusting the light, since you hold down the button as it cycles through levels, and if you accidentally go too far in one direction you have to wait and cycle through it again. 

In the app you can set up either a sunrise or audio alarm, or use them both together. There is also a “smart alarm,” which can ring within 30 minutes of the set wake-up time if it detects you’ve entered the light sleep stage.