Anker SleepLab Pro Says It Can Track Your Heart Rate Without Touching You. Can 60 GHz Radar Really Do That?
No watch. No smart ring. No chest strap.
Anker says its soundcore SleepLab Pro can sit on your nightstand and track your heart rate, breathing, movement, and sleep stages while you sleep.
It does this with 60 GHz millimeter-wave radar.
That sounds strange at first. Radar is something most of us associate with cars, aircraft, or weather systems — not measuring a heartbeat from across a bedroom.
But there are really two separate questions here.
Can 60 GHz radar detect heart rate and breathing without touching the body?
And if it can, does that mean the SleepLab Pro itself is accurate?
Those questions have very different answers.
What Does the SleepLab Pro Actually Claim to Measure?
The SleepLab Pro is more than a bedside speaker.
According to soundcore, its Pro model adds contactless sleep sensing from the nightstand and reports sleep stages, breathing, heart rate, movement, and bedroom conditions without requiring a watch or ring. The company also says it can use those signals to adapt sound and lighting during the night. (soundcore)
Importantly, soundcore also states that SleepLab Pro is not a medical device and does not diagnose sleep apnea or other sleep disorders. (soundcore)
So this is not simply a presence sensor detecting whether someone is in bed.
The device is claiming to extract physiological information from extremely small body movements.
And that is where the radar becomes interesting.
Your Heartbeat Really Does Move Your Body
The SleepLab Pro is not reading the electrical signal from your heart the way an ECG does.
Instead, radar can detect the tiny mechanical movements produced by breathing and cardiac activity.
When you breathe, your chest rises and falls.
That movement is relatively large.
Your heartbeat also produces much smaller movements at the surface of the chest. They are difficult to see, but sensitive radar can detect them through changes in the reflected radio signal.
The important measurement here is phase.
When a radar wave reflects from a moving surface, even a very small change in the distance between the chest and the sensor changes the phase of the returned signal.
Infineon describes the same principle for its 60 GHz vital-sign sensing systems: breathing produces chest motion on the millimeter scale, while cardiac activity produces much smaller motion that can still be extracted from radar phase changes. (Infineon Community)
Texas Instruments also demonstrates mmWave radar detecting the tiny chest displacement produced by both breathing and heartbeat. (Texas Instruments)
So the simplified chain looks like this:
Heartbeat → tiny chest motion → radar phase change → signal processing → estimated heart rate
The radar is not somehow "seeing" your heart.
It is measuring what your heartbeat does to the surface of your body.
This Is Not Just a Theory
The next question is whether radar-based heart-rate monitoring actually works in sleeping humans.
There is meaningful evidence that it can.
A validation study involving healthy participants and patients suspected of obstructive sleep apnea compared non-contact radar measurements with nocturnal polysomnography.
The radar-derived breathing rate and heart rate showed good to excellent agreement with the corresponding PSG measurements across several groups, although performance was not identical under every condition. (PubMed)
A more recent study evaluated three contactless sleep technologies — including a bedside radar system — against laboratory polysomnography in 35 older adults. The researchers concluded that contactless technologies had potential for monitoring nocturnal vital signs, while emphasizing the importance of validation against reference measurements. (PubMed)
This matters because it changes the nature of the SleepLab Pro claim.
The idea that a radar sitting beside your bed can estimate breathing and heart rate is not science fiction.
It is an established research direction with human validation studies behind it.
But that still does not prove that every consumer radar product will perform equally well.
Sleep Stages Are a Much Harder Problem
Heart rate and breathing are one problem.
Determining whether you are in light sleep, deep sleep, or REM sleep is another.
Clinical sleep staging is normally based on polysomnography, or PSG.
PSG can include:
EEG to measure brain electrical activity
EOG to track eye movements
EMG to assess muscle activity
breathing signals
heart signals
body movement
The crucial distinction is that radar does not directly measure the brain activity that defines sleep stages.
Instead, a radar-based system must infer sleep stages from indirect signals such as movement, breathing patterns, and heart-rate behavior.
That does not make radar sleep staging meaningless.
But it does mean that the result is an algorithmic estimate, not the same measurement performed by EEG-based polysomnography.
Can Radar Really Distinguish REM From Deep Sleep?
There is research supporting the concept.
A 2020 validation study compared the commercial Somnofy non-contact radar system with PSG across 71 nights.
Its sleep-stage differentiation scores were reported at approximately 0.75 for N1/N2 sleep, 0.74 for N3, and 0.78 for REM. Human PSG scorers showed higher agreement overall, but the radar system still demonstrated meaningful ability to classify sleep stages. (PubMed)
Researchers have also tested sleep staging specifically with 60 GHz FMCW radar.
One study in an obstructive sleep apnea cohort used 60 GHz radar with a deep-learning model to classify sleep stages, demonstrating that respiration, movement, and radar-derived physiological signals contain enough information for useful sleep-stage prediction. (PubMed)
More recent work continues to explore radar-based five-stage sleep classification, with researchers still working on generalization across different people and populations. (PubMed)
So radar-based sleep staging is scientifically plausible.
But "plausible and demonstrated in research" is not the same thing as "equivalent to a clinical sleep study."
The Bigger Question Is SleepLab Pro Itself
This is where the distinction becomes important.
Research shows that radar can measure breathing and heart-related body motion.
Research also shows that radar signals can be used to estimate sleep stages.
But those studies do not automatically validate the Anker SleepLab Pro.
As of September 22, 2026, I could not find a published independent validation study comparing the SleepLab Pro itself against polysomnography or ECG.
That means several important product-specific numbers are still missing.
For example:
heart-rate error compared with ECG
breathing-rate error compared with a reference sensor
sleep-stage agreement with PSG
performance across different sleeping positions
performance during substantial body movement
night-to-night repeatability
performance in people with sleep disorders
This distinction is easy to miss when evaluating consumer health technology.
Evidence that a sensing method works is not automatically evidence that one specific implementation of that method is accurate.
That is currently the biggest limitation in evaluating SleepLab Pro.
What Happens If Two People Sleep in the Same Bed?
There is another obvious real-world problem.
What if you sleep with a partner?
Now the radar is receiving movement from two breathing bodies, two heartbeats, and two people turning over during the night.
Can it tell them apart?
Interestingly, multi-person radar sensing is technically possible.
A 2024 dataset specifically examined two people monitored simultaneously with 60 GHz FMCW radar, using ECG reference data and different positions, angles, and distances to study the problem of separating respiratory and cardiac signals from multiple targets. (ScienceDirect)
Modern FMCW radar can use spatial information such as distance and angle to help distinguish different targets.
So two people in a room do not automatically make vital-sign radar impossible.
But again, the implementation matters.
Two sleepers lying close together under the same bedding are a much harder target-separation problem than two clearly separated people in a controlled research environment.
Until product-specific testing is available, it is difficult to know how reliably SleepLab Pro handles that situation.
What Could Make Radar Sleep Tracking Go Wrong?
Radar has one major advantage over wearables: you do not have to wear anything.
But contactless sensing comes with its own problems.
The signal produced by breathing and heartbeat is tiny.
Rolling over in bed produces a much larger movement.
A moving arm, changing sleep position, another person in bed, or even the placement of the radar itself can complicate signal extraction.
Radar position also matters.
A study examining different radar positions around a bed found that respiratory monitoring remained relatively robust, while heartbeat extraction varied more depending on sensor placement. (PubMed)
Real-world performance can therefore depend on factors such as:
body movement
sleeping position
distance from the radar
radar angle
bedding
another sleeper
room geometry
signal-processing algorithms
And there is another important distinction.
The radar hardware may detect the physical movement correctly while the software interprets the signal incorrectly.
That becomes particularly important for sleep-stage classification, where algorithms are turning indirect physiological measurements into labels such as REM or deep sleep.
What About Privacy?
A sensor watching you sleep naturally raises another question.
SleepLab Pro does not use a conventional camera.
Soundcore says the system uses no camera, includes a physical microphone cutoff switch, and that the soundcore app has received a SOC 2 Type I report. (soundcore)
That makes radar very different from placing a video camera beside the bed.
But sleep data can still be sensitive.
Heart rate, breathing patterns, sleep timing, movement, and long-term sleep trends can reveal information about daily habits and potentially about health.
So "no camera" should not automatically be interpreted as "no privacy considerations."
For a device like this, how data is stored, processed, transmitted, and retained matters almost as much as what the sensor itself can measure.
So, Can 60 GHz Radar Really Track Your Heart Rate Without Touching You?
Yes.
That part of the claim has solid scientific support.
60 GHz and related mmWave radar systems can detect extremely small chest movements and extract respiratory and cardiac signals without attaching a sensor to the body. The technique has been demonstrated in engineering systems and human sleep studies. (Infineon)
Radar-based sleep-stage estimation is also real.
But it is a more indirect and algorithm-dependent measurement than heart rate or breathing, and it should not be confused with EEG-based clinical sleep staging. (PubMed)
The unanswered question is not whether the underlying radar technology can work.
It can.
The unanswered question is how accurately Anker has implemented it in this specific consumer product under real bedroom conditions.
Claim Science Verdict
VERDICT: Enough Evidence — for the core radar claim, with an important limitation.
There is enough evidence to support the basic claim that 60 GHz radar can detect the small body movements associated with breathing and heartbeat without physical contact.
There is also reasonable scientific support for using radar-derived signals to estimate sleep stages.
However, that does not yet establish the accuracy of the SleepLab Pro itself.
Without independent product-specific validation against ECG or polysomnography, claims about how accurately this particular device measures heart rate, breathing, or individual sleep stages remain less certain.
The surprising part is not that radar can track a heartbeat from your nightstand.
The radar science is real.
What still needs to be proven is how well SleepLab Pro turns that science into reliable nightly measurements.
