Healthcare & Life Sciences

IoT Firmware for Smart Bed Innovation

Our Client’s Backstory

Our client is a global leader in sleep innovation, utilizing biometric tracking and smart bed technology to enhance physical and mental well-being. To maintain their competitive edge, the company sought to introduce a climate-adjustable smart bed, allowing users to individually control mattress firmness and temperature. As a technical partner for over eight years, Klika was engaged to lead the engineering efforts—spanning firmware, hardware orchestration, and software development—to bring this IoT product to the global market.

The Challenges

Developing a mass-market IoT product required overcoming synchronization and performance hurdles. Key challenges included:

Resource-Constrained Engineering: Developing lightweight, optimized firmware capable of running on low-power microcontrollers without compromising processing speed or storage.
Hardware-Firmware Concurrency: Executing firmware and hardware design cycles simultaneously across remote teams in different time zones, requiring alignment for final integration.
Legacy Incompatibility: Architecting a hardware and firmware platform to support advanced climate control features that were incompatible with older generations.
Aggressive Time-to-Market: Fulfilling project deadlines to ensure the client remained the first-to-market with climate-adjustable smart bed technology.
Safety-Critical Real-Time Performance: Implementing safety requirements and real-time responsiveness for consumer-facing hardware.

Solutions

Klika deployed an engineering team to architect a scalable firmware ecosystem and an automated testing framework. Our solution included:

Optimized Firmware Architecture: Engineered a lightweight embedded software layer using C, C++, and Assembly, optimized for minimal resource consumption and high execution speed.
Parallel Development Strategy: Utilized hardware evaluation modules and pre-defined sensors to simulate the target environment, allowing firmware development to proceed independently of the offsite hardware design.
FreeRTOS Integration: Implemented the FreeRTOS real-time operating system to support multi-tasking and safety-critical microcontroller adjustments.
OTA Update Infrastructure: Developed a secure, over-the-air (OTA) firmware update system using the Yocto framework on embedded Linux, ensuring long-term product maintainability.
High-Fidelity Automated Testing: Engineered a "Hardware-in-the-Loop" (HiL) testing system, utilizing oscilloscopes and sniffers to verify signal integrity and communication protocols in real-time.
Continuous Quality Assurance: Automated the entire testing lifecycle, drastically reducing manual testing costs and accelerating development cycles.

The Results

The partnership has resulted in one of the most successful smart bed product launches in the company’s history, cementing Klika’s role as a primary technical advisor.

1 Million+ Active User Accounts: The smart bed technology now powers over a million active accounts, delivering a sleeping experience at a global scale.
8-Year Strategic Partnership: The success of the climate-control initiative solidified an enduring relationship, with Klika now providing a dedicated 70+ person engineering team.
Drastic Reduction in Testing Costs: Automated HiL testing systems significantly lowered the overhead of product validation while improving release quality.
Market Leadership Secured: Enabled the client to successfully launch a new feature ahead of competitors, reinforcing their position as a global innovator in sleep technology.