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We like to share not just what we're building, but a bit of how we think — we believe it's a good way to communicate with the community and build something that lasts. In this article, I'm sharing a few thoughts on how we approached technology on the software/firmware side, with reasonings and examples of how we made some of the key technical decisions.

Why our definition of \"full stack\" wasn't full enough—until we built a physical product

We used to call ourselves full-stack developers.

We could move from frontend to backend, work on the database layer, optimize data pipelines, and even push into algorithm design. That felt like the whole universe.

Until it wasn't.

When we started Somnus Lab, we realized something big: all those things we thought were \"full stack\" existed in a bubble—a bubble built on top of layers we never truly touched. We were shipping code into the cloud. Now we had to ship to a piece of device people would actually sleep on.

Embedded programming. Firmware. Hardware. Thermodynamics. Timing crystals. PCBs. Pumps.

All those things we barely glanced at in university textbooks? We never expected to ship them. Suddenly, we had to. And not just individually—we had to connect them into a coherent chain that couldn't break.

That chain was way longer than we thought.

And here's the kicker: we didn't want to rewrite the universe from scratch. We didn't want to drop into assembly. We didn't want to write deeply inefficient low-level code just to track the sleep mode of a water pump.

We still believed in clean abstractions. We still believed in developer experience. We just had to bring those beliefs lower into the stack.

Turns out, the stack goes deeper. And longer.

🛠️ So We Built a New Stack

When we first mapped out the Somnus Lab Sleep Pad, we realized we weren't just designing a product — we were designing an ecosystem.

Suddenly, the data flow we needed to handle was no longer a neat loop from frontend to backend and back. It became a long, physical-to-digital chain that stretched across layers we'd barely touched before.

Here's what that chain looked like:

\nCapture the world. We needed to collect raw data from a range of sensors: temperature, motion, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), respiratory rate, and snore detection.
\nProcess at the edge. We couldn't just stream everything to the cloud — we had to process key signals locally on the device to make instant decisions: adjust the pump speed, stabilize temperatures, or respond to movement, all without needing a cloud handshake.
\nSend it upstream. Once the important data was distilled, it traveled over MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol that's perfect for low-bandwidth, reliable communication between devices and the cloud.
\nOrchestrate the backend. On the server side, we ran classic backend services to store data, manage user profiles, run analytics, and keep everything in sync.
\nDelight at the surface. Finally, we surfaced all this in a mobile app that gave users real-time insights, controls, and a sense of confidence over their sleep environment.

Key data flow of Somnus Lab Sleep Pad:

The No-Internet Rule

One of our non-negotiable principles: the system must not depend on the internet to keep you safe and comfortable.

It's pretty dumb (and frankly unacceptable) if your bed keeps blasting heat or freezing cold just because your router goes down or your Wi-Fi is spotty. So we engineered the system to fail gracefully and work offline, keeping core functions running locally even when cloud connections are unavailable. That's not just a technical choice — it's a user trust decision.

And here's another reason it matters: Many people now deliberately have a no-internet rule in the bedroom. They turn off their Wi-Fi after 10 p.m., not because they live off the grid, but because they choose to protect their sleep space — even if they still have 5G on their phones. For a product designed to optimize sleep, respecting that choice isn't just thoughtful — it's essential.

Rethinking \"Full Stack\"

What started as a hardware project turned into an end-to-end system that spanned sensors, firmware, network protocols, cloud services, and user-facing apps.

We had to blend embedded constraints with modern software practices — edge computing, state management, modular architecture, and adaptive control loops.

In short: We didn't just build a device. We built a stack that redefined what \"full stack\" really means — and added resilience as a first-class feature.

💡 Why MicroPython?

We were trying to avoid battling low-level languages just to move fast. We didn't want to feel like we were writing drivers just to blink an LED.

In our past life, we came from the Ruby on Rails world.

We built apps fast, deployed on Heroku, and felt spoiled. Clean syntax. Sensible defaults. Convention over configuration. It just worked.

So naturally, when we started working with embedded systems, we joked:

\n
\"Wouldn't it be nice if there were a MicroRuby?\"
\n

But alas—no luck.

We settled on MicroPython—and to be fair, it's pretty amazing.

Yes, the Python 2 vs 3 saga still gets chuckles (and groans). But jokes aside, Python has earned its place at the center of AI and automation. For embedded prototyping, MicroPython is light, expressive, and just powerful enough.

We chose it because it gave us:

High dev velocity
Familiar syntax
Real-time execution on ESP32
The flexibility to build abstractions on top—like our state layer

So we leaned in. And built a framework on top of it.

Ps: We've even considered contributing back to MicroPython—it's still maintained by just a few devs in Australia.

🔄 Why We Needed State Management

Sleep isn't static. The temperature you want at 10:30 p.m. is not what your body needs at 4:00 a.m. or 6:45 a.m.

Our system needed to:

Follow scheduled temperature curves\n
Sync in real time between user, app, and hardware
Recover gracefully from disconnects or power glitches
Allow manual overrides without breaking things
Adapt to user behavior over time via AI-driven personalization\n

We needed a framework that could model transitions, edge cases, and sync rules across components.

So we built our own Redux-inspired state management system, in MicroPython. It's lightweight, predictable, and designed for the unique constraints of firmware.

🔧 Why We Deleted Kubernetes

At first, we went full infra muscle memory:

AWS EKS
Kubernetes clusters
EMR pipelines

Why? Because we could.

We'd spent years building for systems with millions of users, global rollouts, and real-time personalization. Setting up K8s was reflexive.

But soon we realized:

We were burning $500/month before launch
We wouldn't need that much concurrency for a long time
The mental overhead wasn't worth it

So we ditched it.

And went back to something that used to spark joy: Heroku.

Yes, it's been quieter since Salesforce acquired it. But it's still stable. It still works.

And for now, it's perfect for our backend needs.

Sometimes, the boring thing is the best thing—especially when it ships.

Thanks for following along — we're excited to keep sharing what we're learning as we build, experiment, and (hopefully) make sleep a little better for everyone.

🔜 What's Next

We'll soon update to share on: \"How We Built Redux for MicroPython\"?

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It all started with a simple realization: sleep is everything.

It shapes how we feel, how we perform, how we think, and even how we age. Whether you're pushing your body like an athlete or your mind like a developer or investor, sleep is the most powerful, side-effect-free performance enhancer we have.

The more I read, the more I realized:

we actually understand a lot about sleep—but apply very little of it in practice.

We know what good sleep looks like.

We have studies, models, even lab-grade diagnostics.

But most of that stays in the realm of theory, or buried in apps that throw numbers at you without giving you much to act on.

There’s plenty of tracking. Plenty of tips.

But where were the tools that could actually help people sleep better—without needing perfect habits, endless willpower, or a total lifestyle overhaul?

That disconnect stayed in my mind.

And eventually, it became something I wanted to work on.

That’s where the idea for Somnus Lab came from—not just to track sleep better (which is valuable), but to also build the kind of product that makes great sleep more likely, by default.

From Software to Sleep

Before this, my world was software and algorithms. I’ve spent 15+ years building digital products and companies, most recently leading AI personalization at Klarna after they acquired our startup.

But in 2024, I stepped away from the known. Not because I was done building—but because I wanted to build something more physical, human, and tangible. Something that could directly touch people’s lives, night after night.

Why Sleep?

Sleep isn't just a part of our lives—it's a biological imperative. As sleep researcher Matthew Walker often notes, humans spend about a third of our lives asleep, and that’s not some evolutionary accident.

In fact, almost all animals studied—mammals, birds, reptiles, insects—show some form of sleep or rest behavior. Even if the duration and mechanisms vary, the universality of sleep across evolution tells us something: it's essential.

What’s even more fascinating is how recent our scientific understanding of sleep actually is. For decades, researchers couldn’t quite explain why we sleep. But in the last 20 years, neuroscience has made huge leaps—linking sleep to memory consolidation, metabolic regulation, immune function, emotional stability, and cellular repair.

Sure, some of these theories may evolve (as all good science does), but many of today’s explanations are not only convincing—they’re productizable.

And then there's the personal shift. Over the last 10–15 years, I—and many others in the \"high-performance-seeking\" group—have experienced a real mindset change. Back in 2009, I was a full-time master’s student at KTH, building a startup at the SSE Business Lab in Stockholm, and working part-time nights at Bain & Co, covering the US market. My days ended after midnight.

At that time, especially in entrepreneurial circles, sleep was seen as optional—a weakness. The motto was: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

But today, even in fast-moving industries, there’s growing consensus: sleep isn’t a luxury—it’s the foundation.

And as we’ve grown more aware of sleep’s importance, so too has the market for sleep tracking. There’s now a wide array of wearable and non-wearable devices that help us measure sleep quality—albeit not with the accuracy of clinical gold standards like polysomnography (PSG), which involves tracking brain waves, eye movement, muscle tone, and heart rhythm overnight in a lab.

Still, consumer-grade trackers are good enough to start with, and as the saying goes: to improve something, you first need to measure it.

Interestingly, while I find tracking useful, not everyone reacts the same way. Some people—especially those already struggling with sleep—find that knowing they didn’t sleep \"perfectly\" adds stress, which ironically makes sleep even harder. Personally, I’m not bothered by it, but it opened my eyes to a deeper issue:

Yes, we’re tracking more—but then what?

You wake up with a score: 68. Or 82. Maybe it tells you you had too much REM or not enough deep sleep. But what are you supposed to do with that information?

Often, the advice is vague or unhelpful: “Avoid your phone before bed,” “Get more sunlight,” “Eat well, exercise.” All great advice, in theory. But it’s like telling someone who’s struggling with weight, “Just eat healthy and work out.”

If it were that easy, we wouldn’t be here.

So at Somnus Lab, our approach is different. We want to create a solution that works regardless of willpower or perfect conditions—something that’s universally beneficial for anyone trying to sleep better.

That said, we’re not pretending to offer a clinical cure for insomnia. We’re not a replacement for therapy or medical intervention. Think of what we’re building like a great sports coach: we can help you improve your sleep performance, night by night. But if you’ve got a broken leg, we won’t fix the bone. Even then, though, we can still help you move better, more comfortably.

For me, this isn’t just about personal health. It’s about tapping into one of the most overlooked, most potent performance levers we all share. That’s why sleep became the first problem I wanted to solve.

Why Temperature, First

$\"\"$

\nThe circadian rhythm of body temperature, which typically dips during the early morning hours and peaks in the late afternoon or evening

There are a lot of things that affect sleep—light, noise, stress, habits—but temperature stands out. Not just because it’s powerful, but because it’s something we can actually control. And with the right technology, you can personalize it with surgical precision.

Your body follows a roughly 24-hour circadian rhythm—and so does your core temperature. It gradually falls before sleep, reaches its lowest point about 2–3 hours before natural wake-up time, then starts rising to help trigger alertness. When the environment aligns with that rhythm, your body gets the signal faster: cooler when it’s time to fall asleep, warmer when it’s time to wake.

What’s wild is: this rhythm isn’t random. Among your core vital signs—heart rate, breathing, and temperature—temperature is the most stable and predictable across the day, especially if you’re not doing high-intensity activity. That makes it a really strong anchor for your sleep-wake cycle.

And it’s not just about tracking it—it goes both ways. Lowering your environment’s temperature can actually help induce sleepiness. Warming it can help you wake up more gently. If we can align the temperature around you with your internal rhythm, your body gets the message faster.

This isn’t just a theory—it’s one of the most studied and validated levers in sleep science. There are multiple randomized, peer-reviewed studies confirming how thermal shifts influence sleep onset, depth, and architecture. And from my own engineering mindset, many of these explanations are not just well-supported—they’re logically convincing.

So it becomes crucial to align your temperature environment with your sleep rhythm—to keep cool when your body expects to be cool, and warm when it should be warm. you fall asleep easier, wake up better, and spend more time in deep and REM sleep. It all happens quietly in the background.

Last but not least, temperature is a technically solvable problem. Unlike other factors like light (which is tough to control throughout the day), we can design reliable, precise, and comfortable temperature solutions that actually work at home, every night.

So yes, it has a big impact. Yes, the science is there. And yes, we can build something that makes it usable in real life.

Designing for Sleep, Not Just Features

Once we decided to start with temperature, we got to the next first-principle question: How do we design something people actually want to sleep with—not just use?

We didn’t want to build a gadget. We wanted to create a product that would quietly and reliably improve someone’s sleep every night, without demanding attention or adding friction.

That meant stepping away from a tech-first mindset and designing around the human experience. Every feature we prioritized came down to one principle:

\n
Will this actually help someone sleep better, in a real bed, next to a real partner, with real life happening around them?
\n

After a lot of research, testing, and long discussions, we decided to make our first product a thin, water-circulating mattress pad that sits between your sheet and your mattress. It connects to a base unit that heats and cools water, quietly pumping it through channels embedded in the pad to precisely regulate your body temperature throughout the night.

We chose this form factor for a few key reasons:

\n
It’s minimally invasive: no fans, no clunky air ducts, nothing bulky or loud.
\n
\n
It blends into your existing setup: you don’t need to change your bed, mattress, or habits.
\n
\n
And it gives us the precision we wanted—water is far more efficient and responsive than air when it comes to thermal regulation.
\n

This was our way of building something powerful, but invisible. A product that disappears into the background while it does its work.

Beyond the science, we’ve also thought a lot about the user experience. Temperature needs are highly individual—one person’s ideal sleep temp might be unbearable to someone else. That’s why we built in dual-zone control, so you and your partner don’t have to compromise. You can each define your own optimal microclimate.

You can manually adjust the temperature if you know what works for you—or let our beta AI system handle it. It learns your rhythm and fine-tunes the thermal curve through the night, so you don’t have to think about it.

We probably need another post to go deeper into how we reasoned through our product boundaries—what we chose to include, what we deliberately left out, and why good sleep design starts with restraint.

Stay tuned

We’re just getting started. In the next post, I’ll share more about how this project came together—the shift from software to hardware, the messy early prototyping phase, and the lessons we learned designing a product you sleep with, not just on.

If you’re interested in sleep, performance, hardware, or the realities of building something from scratch—stick around.

There’s a lot more to come.

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When I learned our Somnus Lab Sleep Pad had won the Red Dot Award for Product Design, I felt pleasantly surprised and genuinely honored. Winning in the category of Personal Care, Wellness, and Beauty felt like a beautiful acknowledgment of what we've been quietly building—something more personal than just another tech gadget, something designed to genuinely enhance lives.

$\"\"$

Beyond Traditional Categories

Honestly, I've always struggled to fit our product into a neat category. Smartized devices in greneral are really hard to fit in existing product taxonomy. Traditional mattresses haven't fundamentally changed for centuries—just foam and springs, nothing actively adaptive. We didn't want to simply improve on existing products; we set out to completely rethink what sleep technology could do. What if your sleeping environment actively worked with you to optimize health and comfort? That was our starting point, and our Red Dot Award confirms we’re onto something special.

$\"\"$

Scandinavian by Accident

Living in Sweden for over a decade, Scandinavian design gradually seeped into my consciousness without me even noticing. Minimalism, simplicity, functionality—these became second nature. When I look at our final product, I now realize how naturally these principles were reflected. It wasn't intentional at first, but it perfectly matches the calm and intuitive feeling we wanted the Sleep Pad to convey.

$\"\"$

The Great Debate: Invisible vs. Iconic

In our earliest meetings, we spent hours debating our design approach. Should the Sleep Pad blend invisibly into your bedroom, quietly improving your sleep in the background? Or should it boldly announce itself as a beautifully crafted piece, much like products from Dyson or Bang & Olufsen?

In the end, we found our sweet spot somewhere in between—calm yet clearly technological, elegant yet quietly confident.

Early Sketches

In this stage, they are really rough ideas. We didn't have a lot of boundaries, just freestyling a few directions.

Moodboard/inspiration

$\"\"$

Round 1 concepts

$\"\"$

Refined Sketches

Seeing a few real designs, it's easier to point ourselves in a clearer direction. After several rounds of iteration, we narrowed our focus to three main concepts. Each had unique strengths, and ultimately, we selected the best aspects from each, blending them into the final design you see today.

$\"\"$

Below are the three main concepts that could have made it to the final. We ended up cherry picking the favourite parts of each concept and moved towards a design that is closer to what we see today.

Concept A: Minimalistic and subtle, designed to blend seamlessly into the bedroom environment.

$\"\"$

Concept B: Bold and clearly tech-driven, inspired by iconic consumer tech products.

$\"\"$

Concept C: Softly futuristic, offering a gentle blend of organic shapes with advanced technological features to enhance both aesthetic appeal and user interaction.

$\"\"$

After exploring these distinct design directions—Concept A (minimalistic subtlety), Concept B (bold technological presence), and Concept C (soft futurism), instead of limiting ourselves, we took a step back, carefully examining each concept's strengths.

We asked ourselves: What would it look like to blend minimalism's quiet comfort, bold technology's intuitive clarity, and futurism's inviting warmth?

The answer became the design you see today—calm yet sophisticated, intuitive yet quietly innovative. By selectively combining the best elements of all three concepts, we crafted a product that is both subtly elegant and profoundly functional. This careful fusion allowed our Sleep Pad to resonate deeply with users, ultimately helping us earn recognition through the prestigious Red Dot Award.

$\"\"$

Material Adventures & Lessons Learned

Our journey wasn't limited to digital screens or cozy conference rooms. We got our hands dirty, traveling to trade shows and supplier factories, diving deep into every material imaginable—plastic, metal, wood, glass fiber, even titanium. It was funny how our initial excitement at flashy consumer product exhibits quickly faded. Soon, we found ourselves gravitating to the less glamorous manufacturers' alleys, surrounded by components and raw materials. Touching, feeling, and understanding these materials was invaluable; 3D printing is convenient, but it can never fully replace the importance of hands-on interaction.

$\"\"$

Quiet Voices, Big Impact

Throughout development, we made a conscious effort to deeply listen, tuning into Reddit discussions, conducting user surveys, engaging with sleep scientists, and hosting intimate focus groups. While it's difficult to point to a single dramatic insight, I know our design was shaped by countless subtle suggestions and quiet user feedback. That continuous dialogue made quite some difference.

$\"\"$

Interactive Details: More Than Just Pretty Lights

Every detail matters to us, especially how users interact with the product. Something as seemingly simple as LED indicators became an opportunity to enhance the user experience—amber for active mode, blue signaling Bluetooth readiness, orange prompting a water refill. Each decision was about creating an intuitive connection, making the Sleep Pad feel personal and responsive.

$\"\"$

A Milestone Worth Celebrating

Winning the Red Dot Award isn't just a badge of honor—it’s validation of our approach, mixing design elegance and health-tech innovation. More importantly, it reminds us we're on the right path in making a meaningful difference in people's lives.

$\"\"$

What Comes Next?

We're genuinely excited about where Somnus Lab is headed—more innovations, deeper user connections, and broader partnerships. If you're curious, inspired, or interested in working together, please reach out. Let's keep reimagining sleep, together.

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