By Anthony Karcz,Eight Sleep,Senior Contributor

Copyright forbes

Pillow covers complete the head-to-toe “Sleep OS” experience
Eight-Sleep

You know how satisfying it feels when your head hits a cool pillow, especially after one side has heated up from you laying on it and you flip it over to find the “cool side” again? Turns out that clinical studies (like this one from the National Institute of Health) show clear results that keeping your head cool can help you fall asleep faster and sleep more soundly overall.

It’s no wonder, then, that there’s been a veritable sleep technology tsunami centered around just pillows. They’re filled with temperature-sensitive gels or air baffles or foam. There are pillows that you carefully craft just for your sleep style.

But until now there hasn’t been a water-cooled pillow that uses AI to maintain temperature and adjust on the fly to help you stay asleep.

Eight Sleep Pod Pillow Cover

The cover fits over your existing pillow
Eight Sleep

Part of their Pod lineup, Eight Sleep has introduced a new pillow cover and hub that operates in concert with the larger mattress cover.

The concept is simple: you put the cover on your existing pillow (or one of Eight Sleep’s memory foam Air Pillows) and connect it to its hub. The hub works with your mattress cover hub to coordinate temperatures and circulate water through the cover to maintain a consistent temperature throughout the night, from 55° to 110°F.

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If you have an Autopilot subscription, Eight Sleep’s AI assistant will cool down or warm up your pillow cover to give you the optimal temperature for your current sleep phase: cooling it down to help you stay asleep or warming it up as it gets closer to the end of your sleep cycle.

It does this by circulating temperature-controlled water through silent hydro channels. By Eight Sleep’s measurements, the Pillow Cover stays up to 25°F cooler than a standard pillow all night long. There’s even a convenient button on the cover so that you can make manual adjustments.

Will It Be Comfortable?

Hydro-cooling channels will keep your pillow cool (or warm if that’s what you like)
Eight Sleep

Looking at the design, it will be interesting to see if Eight Sleep’s method, which works so well for mattresses, can translate to something smaller and more mobile. With the cover on, your pillow will end up tethered, so you won’t be able to flip it.

But being able to preserve the comfort of the pillow is key, and it’s something that I’m sure Eight Sleep will be able to deliver. Their latest mattress covers do a bit of black magic where they insert a cooling layer between you and your mattress without being overly stiff, thus maintaining the cushioning of the mattress.

It’s a harder trick to pull off when you have a much smaller surface area but I’m assuming that the hydro channel density will be lower so that you can still feel your pillow through the cover.

But At What Cost?

The latest Pod 5 system already had accommodations for the company’s latest cooling blanket innovation so I was surprised to see there isn’t an all-in-one solution for the Pillow Cover as well. Maybe we’ll see that when Eight Sleep introduces their next-generation system.

The Pillow Cover comes with its own, separate hub, which increases the cost exponentially. A single cover retails at $1,000 while two covers are $1,649. They also have to integrate with a new or existing Pod 5 system. That means that you’re adding approximately a fifth of the price of your mattress cover just for one pillow cover. Even for a high-end luxury sleep system, that’s a lot.

But if you’re the kind of person who spends a significant portion of their evening flipping their pillow in search of the cool side or you’re simply willing to do whatever it takes to improve your sleep quality and efficiency, then the Pillow Cover could be a compelling add-on to your Eight Sleep system. You can find out more on the company’s website.

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