If you’ve ever slept on a Tempur-Pedic mattress, there’s no doubt you felt like Nic Cage finally finding the National Treasure. What if I told you that those heavenly beds from outer space are yesterday’s news? One Atlanta-based startup has created a sleep revolution, ushering in a new era of health and performance. Created through a patented system called Adaptive Sleep Thinking™ that responds to your body, ReST (Responsive Surface Technology) is the world’s first truly smart bed. We recently chatted with General Manager, Lloyd Sommers, to learn more.
Founded by Rob Golden, “ReST’s mission is to use technology to create the perfect sleep environment. We are the only company with an integrated solution to track sleep data and automatically respond to that data to help people sleep better,” explains Sommers. “Our main product, the ReST Bed™, incorporates our patented smart fabric, which senses changes in pressure and interacts with the mattress in order to automatically respond to the sleeper’s comfort and support needs throughout the night. In addition, a ReST Bed provides useful information and data about consumers’ sleep patterns. Above all, ReST Beds™, like all of our products, help people sleep better so that they can live healthier and more productive lives.”
“About half of the country doesn’t sleep well. Sleep is one-third of what we call the ‘health trifecta,’ which are the three aspects that make for a healthy life: diet, exercise, and sleep,” he says. “If you sleep better, you have a much higher quality of life.” In order to help people perform better, ReST has a patented elastic, flexible and breathable pressure-aware fabric: a smart fabric. “The fabric is undetectable, durable, wireless, and is permanently integrated into surfaces. In this way, it is beyond a wearable because it does not interfere with normal sleeping positions/routines and collects whole-body pressure and body position. The technology has been used for decades in the medical field, but we are the first and only company to use it in sleep applications. We are seeking to do for the bedroom and sleep what Google’s Nest has done for thermostats and alarm: be an active and automatic solution.”
ReST’s founder, Rob Golden, is considered to be the ‘Godfather’ of pressure-sensing technology. A MIT and Harvard Business School grad, he started the field of pressure-mapping when he founded Tekscan (subsequently sold to GE). Since then, Rob went on to start 10 other companies, but he had always been on the lookout for a pressure sensor that had certain key properties: elasticity, flexibility, breath-ability, undetectability, durability, readily available, and inexpensive. “He found it! And that’s the patented smart fabric we use in our ReST Beds,” says Sommers.
Having garnered extraordinary national attention and awards at CES, the ReST team are proud to bring some of the spotlight to their homebase of Atlanta. They were also named one of TAG’s Ten Most Innovative Companies. “One of the largest and oldest mattress companies, Simmons, is based in Atlanta. Two of our management team members who spent time at Simmons,” he says. “We have a showroom in West Midtown, not far from Georgia Tech, which is great because we’re a sleep technology company, so it’s great to be near that energy.”
Follow ReST on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RestPerformance
Twitter: https://twitter.com/restperformance
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/responsive-surface-technology-llc
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Restperformance/posts
