Concord

A bedside device that tracks your heart rate, respiratory rate, and sleep — without anything on your body.

Role

Design Engineer

Industry

Digital Health / Sleep Tech

Duration

5 months

Wearables are how most people track their health, and most people stop using them. About 1 in 3 users quit within a year, and half within 18 months. In our survey of 41 people, 40% of those who stopped tracking sleep said the device was uncomfortable to wear to bed. Another 40% of those who never started said they don't want to wear something to sleep.

That gap matters most when something goes wrong. A resting heart rate only looks abnormal if there are months of normal to compare it to.

How might we capture the health data people want, over months and years, without asking them to wear, charge, or remember anything?

We surveyed 41 people and interviewed 6. The research pointed to the daily opt-in as the failure point. Health data is most useful in hindsight, and hindsight needs a continuous record. The signals that matter most (resting heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, sleep stages) are captured during sleep anyway.

Concord makes tracking the default. The device does the remembering.

Exploration & Tradeoffs

We started with the data, not the form: how do you get heart rate and breathing rate accurately without putting anything on the body? We compared mmWave radar, thermal cameras, low-light and depth cameras, and the PPG-and-motion stack wearables use. Cameras were out, since a camera in the bedroom is invasive. We dropped the thermal camera because we didn't need what it added. mmWave measures chest movement directly and never captures an image of anyone. The tradeoff is that the heartbeat is the hardest signal for radar. The movement is tiny and body motion corrupts it. We accepted that because the alternative was a device people stop using.

Then the radar set the rules for the design. In our first test, our user wore their Whoop while the sensor tracked them at home, and the two datasets were close. The dropouts came in another user test when they drifted toward the edge of the sensing zone. That made placement the problem, not the sensor. Testing showed the radar has to point at the chest at about a 45° angle, or sit on the same plane as it. Beds and nightstands sit at different heights, so I explored ways to aim it: fixed or clipped to the wall or bed frame, and stands with adjustable angle, height, or both.

An adjustable stand creates its own problem: someone has to set it up. We designed a one-time onboarding flow to walk them through placement.

How Does It Work?

Concord uses a 60 GHz millimeter-wave radar to detect chest movement as small as 0.3 mm. The slower signal is breathing and the faster one is the heartbeat. A BME680 sensor adds room temperature, humidity, pressure, and air quality. A companion app turns the data into plain-language takeaways instead of raw charts.

Refining Details

The final form is a rounded-square face on two aluminium rods, with a loop handle. The face is fabric because the radar needs non-metallic material in front of the sensor, and it keeps the device from looking like medical equipment. It's meant to sit beside a lamp and a stack of books.

Next Iteration

The next version makes the center housing detachable from the rods, so it can mount on a headboard. The radar also reads one person at a time. Two people in range corrupted our overnight tests, so multi-person sensing is next. Lastly, the companion app is to be further built out.