ReST Smart Bed review: An app-connected mattress for a good night's rest

What is the ReST mattress?

ReST Smart Bed is a rather new line of smart mattresses that are fully customizable, automatically adjust to you as you move during the night, and tracks your sleep with its accompanying app.

Strictly speaking, it's not an entire bed. It's an upgrade to your existing mattress, one that incorporates smart fabric that is interwoven with silver thread and a semi-conductive layer that can provide a wealth of insights by sensing pressure.

ReST mattresses are available in twin XL, queen, split-top queen, eastern king, California king, split-top king, split-top eastern king, and split-top California king. In our case, we opted for the split-top king.

Aside from different sizes, ReST offers three different styles of bed, with the ReST Essential bed as the most affordable with three adjustable zones. The ReST Original — the one we have — has five adjustable zones, and the ReST Original with GelGrid is at the high end, also with five zones.

The mattress is made of very nice feeling fabric that has this almost honeycomb-like texture that provides ventilation. The gel-infused memory foam is extremely comfortable and the whole 13-inch-thick mattress feels very high quality.

How it works

The adjustable body zones are spaced throughout the bed. Head, shoulders, lumbar, hips, and legs are all individually supported and fully adjustable.

Inside each zone are air cushions that are inflated and deflated to achieve the correct level of firmness.

Inflating these cushions is a pair of pumps — one for each side of the bed. These pumps have a USB power adapter and five air houses that need to be fully connected during setup.

As you move, the bed's sensors detect how you are laying and where your pressure points are throughout the night. It will then inflate or deflate the individual zones to optimize your comfort, based on your preference settings in the app.

Set up your bed

When buying a ReST bed, you have two different options to choose from. You can handle the installation on your own, or you could opt for the white-glove service.

If you rely on a ReST partner for the white glove delivery service, they will deliver your bed, install and set up the ReST mattress, and remove your old mattress for you. For our mattress, we did everything ourselves.

The mattress arrived in a large cardboard box, rolled up like many other memory foam mattresses. We grunted and strained as we dragged it into the master bedroom, before placing it on top of our metal bed frame.

Before connecting the pumps, we unzipped the top of the mattress to ensure all the air bladders were in place and didn't shift in transport. With everything looking ok, we zipped the top back up.

On the back edge of the bed, two sets of four clear air hoses protrude. Each hose is clearly labeled on the end to identify which zones it controls, and they also match with corresponding plugs located on the pump.

We routed the hoses under our headboard and under our nightstands, where we stored the pumps. The pump is powered over USB, and the USB cable and power adapter are included.

As soon as everything was properly connected, we downloaded and installed the ReST app to connect the pumps to our network. The app walked through the process of connecting to the device's network, entering our Wi-Fi SSID and password, and moving it to our Wi-Fi.

There were a few basic onboarding questions we had to answer during the app setup, including some personal information, so that it can best adjust to you while sleeping.

Split king for the win

One option that ReST offers is the split-top king. For those unfamiliar, a split top king is a king-sized bed, but it is split halfway through, from the head to the midpoint.

This is primarily useful when paired with an adjustable frame. You can get a frame that will elevate the bed into a fully upright position, whether you want to sleep more upright to reduce snoring, for reading in bed, or while watching TV.

A split king allows independent control of each side of the bed, alongside the existing firmness control the ReST bed offers.

The ReST app — full of smarts

The bed itself is great, but a full "smart" experience isn't just the bed itself anymore. It is the bed, as well as a partnered app.

There are many options for consumers to choose between, including smart beds — such as ReST — or companion products such as Apple's Beddit or Withing's sleep analyzing pad. We'll talk more about those options in a moment.

Turning back to the ReST app, there are some incredible insights that you can get from the technology included in the ReST mattress and control the mattress itself.

How firm do you like it?

As we mentioned at the inset, the ReST mattress has five individually controllable zones. All zones are displayed graphically under an outline of the human form.

Instead of simply saying "neck" or "lower back," it is very easy to quickly see which parts of your body will be affected by each adjustment.

As an added effect, there is a real-time pressure map of the bed itself. You can see exactly where your pressure points are and how it changes as you move. There is less than a one-second delay between your moves and the animation in the app in use.

We typically use the bed in automatic mode, where it will make adjustments on the fly as you move throughout the night. When in the app, you can see exactly what that means. Our head and foot sections inflate to provide slightly more support as we move from our side to our back.

Just as the app animates your pressure points, the actively inflating or deflating compartments also animate.

As air is added or released from the various compartments, they will light up so you can tell what is happening, and that the bed is responding to your moves. Of course, you won't be watching this as you sleep, but it is extremely cool to see as you lie in bed at night.

To control the bed, you can choose your firmness as well as sensitivity. Firmness is fairly self-explanatory, but sensitivity could use a bit of exposition.

If you increase the sensitivity, the bed will be more sensitive to your movements, and it will adjust more frequently. If you want less frequent adjustments, you can turn the sensitivity down.

For those who want more granular control, you can swap from automatic mode to manual mode. Manual allows full control over each of the five adjustment sections to tune to your preference without relying on the bed's intelligence to guess.

A second option is position mode, which lets you choose your settings for when you sleep on your back, as well as for on your side.

Gain some night vision

Data is an incredible thing, and ReST has plenty of it. If you couldn't tell already from the smarts required to automatically adjust the bed as you move, the Night Vision tab will push it over the edge.

Atop the Night Vision tab is your nightly ReST score. This numeric value falls between 0 and 100 and gives you an idea of how well you slept.

This score is derived from several factors that are listed directly below it.

The key inputs for your score are your number of sleep cycles, how long you slept, how long you spent awake after initially falling asleep, how efficient your sleep was, and how many restless movements you had. These are appropriately weighted and combined into your ReST score. Each of these metrics also has the recommended value you listed, so you understand how to interpret them.

Beyond the score, there are many other metrics to delve into.

The sleep stages graph gives you a timeline of the night and how long you spent in light, deep, or REM sleep as well as awake or not in bed.

Breaths Per Minute chart shows your breathing throughout the night. It gives you your average breath rate and plots them all on a chart for you to see how it changed.

The last two metrics show your sleep position (split between back, left, and right sides) as well as REM analysis.

There's just one issue with Night Vision, in that it isn't a native experience. Sure, it is built into the app and appears as a tab, but it is clearly just loading a web view.

This isn't a problem when done well in apps. If pulled off successfully, users won't know — or care — what the heck the difference is between a web view and a native app interface.

But this web view has some issues scaling to various screen sizes. On our iPhone 12 Pro Max, there is this non-negligible amount of horizontal scroll. When you scroll up or down, the horizontal scroll isn't locked, and the whole interface slides around left and right.

Night Vision is in beta, though, so this is certainly something that could be addressed. ReST has been very open to receiving user feedback and is aware of the UI issues plaguing Night Vision.

One way we'd love to see Night Vision improve is integration with Apple Health, something ReST says they plan to integrate with at some point in the future, but not at the time of this review. The integration would allow your sleep to sync to Apple Health alongside any other health data you've collected from other apps and accessories.

Should you buy the ReST smart mattress?

This brings us back to comfort, the overall experience, and whether or not the ReST bed is a good investment.

In our time using this mattress, we've found it one of the most comfortable beds we've ever laid in. As you can adjust the firmness, it was perfect for our liking, and as time goes on, if your preference changes, the bed can change with you. There is no need to get a new bed.

During the night, as we move or turn over, the fact the bed moves with us is incredible. At times when awake, you can feel the firmness of the bed change, and it is very cool but always comfortable.

We've never been woken by the movement or the sound from the pumps either.

The smarts are nice, but if the bed isn't comfortable, it is of no use. In this case, the comfort was worth it alone, and the smart technology is just the icing on the cake.

When it comes to all the smart technology, we've got those two primary benefits, namely the automatic adjustments in the bed and sleep tracking.

This sleep tracking is the most complete and verbose that we've seen — and we've tried our fair share of sleep tracking tech. Your Apple Watch alone gives you a small amount of data, and there are options such as the aforementioned Beddit or Withings devices that get placed under your mattress.

These devices help and provide more automatic tracking features than just your watch, but still not nearly as much data as ReST can surface. If you're looking for more data than these other devices are able to provide without having to add anything extra to your mattress, ReST is the solution.

Sleep Number is the big name in this space, but ReST undercuts them on price, offers a longer ten-year warranty, has more adjustment options, and automatically responds to movements. Picking between Sleep Number and ReST is easy. We'd pick the latter.

If the comfort and smarts weren't enough, ReST backs up its product with a ten-year warranty that will replace any of the modular components, so you literally rest easy that your investment is sound.

Overall, this bed has more than impressed. It certainly isn't perfect, and we're eagerly awaiting the native integration with Apple Health, but it shows much promise on top of the fantastic experience thus far.

Pros

• Incredibly comfortable mattress for great sleep
• Adjusts with you as you move
• Entirely adjustable firmness from soft to firm
• Smart fabric tracks your sleeping
• Independent controls for each side of the bed
• Compatible with adjustable bed riser
• Easy control through app
• Tons of insight into your sleep
• Different settings for back versus side sleeping
• Very quiet air pumps
• White glove installation service available
• High build quality
• A ton of sleep analysis and data
• Daily sleep scores

Cons

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

You can pick up a ReST smart mattress from the company's website, starting at $2,999.