Making Your Bed and Lying in It: Smart Beds, Sleep Technologies, and the National Football League

• In Event: Science, Technology and Sport - I: Sporting Technologies and Narratives

Abstract

In 2018 Sleep Number became an official health and wellness sponsor of the National Football League Players’ Association. Approximately 1,600 players now use the 360 Smart Bed, a mattress that is equipped with exclusive Sleep IQ Technologies and biometric sensors that allow users to track sleep quality and duration. Each morning athletes received a Sleep IQ score and biometric data related to heart and breathing rates. Over time, the 360 Smart Bed begins to understand the user’s optimal sleep cycles and offers recommendations on how to maximize nightly rest. This paper places the recent embrace of smart beds and other sleep technologies in the NFL within a broader cultural context shaped by a promotional sleep culture. By drawing on science studies, the cultural studies of sport, and the literature from critical studies of sleep, I investigate how issues of surveillance and health are discussed in key public narratives connected to sleep and professional football. I conclude this paper by exploring what it might mean to take Simone Browne’s (2015) call for a critical biometric consciousness seriously in sleep-related discussions and consider how high-stakes, professional sport contexts, such as the NFL, come to shape ideas and practices around rest and recovery in modern life.

Author

• Sarah Barnes, Georgia Institute of Technology