What (if anything) will it do in the absence of their service? Is there any open source software/open protocols/etc... for it?
After being burned a few times, I've resolved to make hardware purchasing decisions based only on what a device can do using built-in/self-hosted software without any external services...but vendors make this difficult or impossible to figure out from the marketing glossies.
I don't believe it would function at all without their online services, it actually connects directly to wifi so it's definitely doing something important through that. I haven't looked into it but I bet everything is proprietary all the way up the stack.
And honestly that's fine for me. I don't plan on using this forever, I mainly got it since it is far cheaper than going through an actual therapist to do CBT for insomnia, so I figured I'd try this first.
Another thing to consider: It's definitely a wear item. It's got a fabric construction on the outside that seems to me like it will collect body oil + dirt/grime and it can't easily be cleaned. On the whole it feels kind of delicate. To be fair though, I don't know if it's possible to make a long lasting eeg based sleep tracker that's also comfortable to wear.
After being burned a few times, I've resolved to make hardware purchasing decisions based only on what a device can do using built-in/self-hosted software without any external services...but vendors make this difficult or impossible to figure out from the marketing glossies.