For all the ways that technology has enabled infidelity, from sexting to the adultery website Ashley Madison, partner-monitoring innovations may be catching up.
There are webcams that sync to your smartphone, spying apps that remotely track your significant other’s social media activity, and, most recently, a mattress that alerts you when someone is having vigorous, acrobatic sex in your bed.
The Durmet “Smarttress” boasts a so-called Lover Detection System with hidden ultrasonic sensors built into its springs that detect when your bed is being used for sport when you’re not home.
If it’s getting a workout, you’ll receive an alert on your smartphone, where you can monitor duration, intensity, and impact per minute as long as you have a 4G connection.
The brainchild of Durmet, a small mattress company in northern Spain, “Smartress” officially launched last week with a video marketing campaign warning of a “global infidelity crisis.”
We see couples screaming at each other in dark corners; sweaty lovers in various states of undress; an engagement ring thrown carelessly on the floor. Doomsday music builds to a climax as the camera pans from shaking bedposts to the culprits beneath a duvet, then cuts to a cell phone beeping menacingly.
It’s a brilliant parody of a PSA, though there’s apparently a serious demand for this kind of technology.
Durmet was struggling to find a niche market for innovative products when they landed on a study from Ashley Madison, the cheating website, that found Spain was the most unfaithful country in Europe.
“This technology has been present in mattresses for a couple of years already,” Damian Lucas, project coordinator for the Smarttress ad campaign, told The Daily Beast, referring to the “matrix” of 24 sensors in the mattress and an algorithm system that detects “suspicious” activity.
Durmet collaborated with Grey Advertising to “fuse the innovation with the concept,” Lucas said, so that men and women “can relax at night and be reassured during the day.”
Lucas also stressed that the mattress is as comfortable as any premium quality mattress, and that the sensors are feather light. “People delivering the mattress don’t even know that it’s any different from an ordinary mattress,” he added.
Though it’s only available in Spain for now, with prices starting at $1750, Lucas said Durmet’s already planning to expand outside of Spain and, eventually, overseas. He also said they can’t yet determine how many mattresses they’ve sold, but that Durmet has been inundated with requests for the product, particularly from prospective clients in Britain and South America.
“The impact has been much bigger than [Durmet] was expecting,” Lucas said. “They weren’t prepared for this reaction.”
The Spanish lifestyle, with its daily siestas and nightlife culture, seems particularly conducive to affairs. Lucas admitted this may contribute to spousal paranoia, but that it wasn’t clear whether the country’s infidelity rates were directly linked to Spanish culture.
In theory, Smarttress seems like a fantastic tool to ensure conspiratorial types that their partners aren’t bringing lovers and hookers home at odd hours—unless the cheater opts for the kitchen counter, the bathroom floor, or any other household surface. Surely the conjugal bed would be a last resort for a quickie with the poolboy.
Regardless of how much people are catching on to the idea that monogamy is an outdated socioeconomic construct, Smarttress and other partner-monitoring products indicate that capitalism has a vestigial morality after all.