Kickstarter sensation Sense delays sleep tracking gadget until February 2015

Sense, the incredible sleep-tracking gadget that blew through its Kickstarter goals, receiving $2.1 million, has been delayed until February 2015.

An email sent out to Kickstarter backers earlier this week from James Proud, CEO at Hello (the company that created Sense), said that the company has delayed the device in order to complete further testing and to ship a “great” product:

I’ve seen every single one of your notes and questions asking about when you’ll get your Sense, so I just wanted to update you on where we are.

Some people are using Sense now and it’s nearly at a stage where most would say it’s good enough to send out. I owe it to you to only release a product that is great, not just good. Although some would settle for delivering something that’s just good enough, I want us to keep pushing to ship something great.

I have therefore decided to extend our testing period for Sense. I feel there is still some important fine tuning to do to ensure a great product. As a result, we will start delivering in February and will fulfill all orders by the end of the month. Of course this is frustrating, but I know that Sense will be more robust if we put it through its paces for a final few months having been in many hundreds of homes and through thousands of hours of use.

We are still catching tiny edge cases of anomalies, therefore I want to err on the side of caution and devote extra testing time to ensure Sense is as brilliant as you, and we, expect it to be.

– James, Founder & CEO

The previous update to backers noted that the company had seeded Sense into some homes for beta testing just two weeks ago.

Sense is a bedside gadget that monitors your sleep and offers suggestions to improve it alongside data about the sleep itself. The device has a number of sensors onboard, including a microphone, temperature, and air quality monitoring, which it uses to offer informed advice on how to improve sleep in a mobile app.

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Many popular Kickstarter projects have missed deadlines or delayed their projects but still deliver their products, most notably Pebble which raised $10 million and slipped by a few months.