It seems like everything these days is smart. There are smartphones, smart TVs, smart cars, and even smart light bulbs and doorbells. So, when my brother-in-law (the techie of the family) bought a smart mattress, I was intrigued and skeptical. Why exactly would you want a smart bed? How is it any different? Turns out, a smart mattress is actually pretty useful and really cool. The next time I was at their house, my brother-in-law made it a point to show off all the features of their new bed from Eight. After seeing everything it could do, I decided to check it out.

Eight is a tech company specializing in improving sleep through comfortable mattresses built with advanced technology. Eight smart mattress can track over 15 factors like sleep patterns, heart rate, respiratory rate and details on REM sleep. Beyond the sleep and health tracking, Eight's smart mattresses can sync with your smart home technology to help measure and optimize your sleep. This is especially important, because improving and achieving more restful sleep can actually help improve your days, too.

They have a few different mattress options; I chose a medium firm model with the smart tech features. I'm not the kind of person who wears a FitBit and tracks everything I do, but I am interested in things like knowing if I'm getting restful sleep. The mattress is designed so that you can turn on the functions for the entire bed or separately so both people in the bed can control their sides.

I prefer the bed to be warm when I sleep and my husband likes it cooler, so we change our temperatures and pick our settings as needed. The sleep tracking features give us a sleep score, and even tells us how often we toss and turn during the night. It helps both my husband and me understand how to get deeper, more restful sleep.

Perhaps the coolest part of the mattress is that it can sync with Google Home so I can set it to turn off the lights or turn down the TV when we get in bed, or can even set it to turn on the coffee maker in the morning when we wake up! Getting the mattress setup and synced was simple and after a few nights sleeping on the bed, we were already getting use out of all the features. Eight offers a 100 night trial in case you don't love the mattress and even has financing optionsthat make it easy with $0 down. We're only paying $36 a month with no interest, and we were approved within minutes.

I was skeptical about how anyone could really need a smart mattress until I tried it for myself. Okay, maybe I don't need a smart mattress, but it's definitely enhanced my sleep and improved my daily life more than any other "smart" thing I own. And on top of that, it's downright comfortable. It kind of makes me feel like I'm in the Jetson family or on some black-and-white space show from my childhood. Comfortable, restful sleep and smart features? I don't know why we waited so long to upgrade!