• Historically specialized in personal scales, the company Terraillon is taking the health turn with Aloha.

  • Sold for 79 euros, this small, easy-to-use light alarm clock aims to help us fall asleep and wake up better.

  • Suffering from some ergonomic problems, the device has its limits and has some competitors that are better equipped and only slightly more expensive.

Scale manufacturer Terraillon is moving from the bathroom to the bedroom.

With Aloha, the historic brand no longer wants to worry only about our weight, but also about our sleep.

A health shift already started a few months ago with Homni, a connected luminous alarm clock.

Sold for 79 euros, Aloha (which means "Hello" or "Goodbye" in Hawaiian) is also a luminous alarm clock, but is intended to be simpler than its elder.

"20 Minutes" spent a few nights with him.

A disconnected product

It is a caressing little object.

Shaped like a pebble (11 x 7 cm) to be plugged into the mains, Aloha stands out at first glance with its luminous dome surrounded by four small touch buttons.

Here is undoubtedly the ally of softer nights!

On its base covered with gray fabrics is a display to indicate the time.

And you have to turn the device over to discover a few buttons to operate the basic settings: setting the time, programming an alarm clock (unique), but also the musical ringtone and its volume.

Double observation: Aloha is not a connected product, and it will be impossible to wake up with it while listening to your favorite music or the radio of your choice.

There remains a primary vocation: to help us fall asleep and wake up gently.

Four light programs

To achieve this, Aloha offers two sleep programs, a wake-up program and an ambient light program.

For the latter, a long press on the touch button at the back of the dome allows you to choose the color of the desired light.

It will be very soft, will create an intimate and warm atmosphere in the bedroom, but will clearly lack intensity for other occupations than a hug.

If you want to read, the use of a bedside lamp remains mandatory.

To fall asleep, it is possible to choose a “Sunset” mode.

With it, the light from the lamp will gradually change from a beautiful orange hue to a dense and very warm red in about twenty minutes.

Then turn off.

The idea here is not to block the secretion of melatonin, the sleep hormone, and to make it easier for us to fall asleep.

A second program called “Cardiac Coherence Mode” allows you to model your breathing on a red light that becomes more or less dense, with metronomic regularity.

The exercise lasts fifteen minutes.

We liked it, especially for its ability to relax us by slowing our heart rate down to six breaths per minute and focusing our thoughts on our breath alone.

We fell asleep several times before the end of the exercise, but it's hard to say if the lamp really helped or if fatigue (and our ability to fall asleep easily!) played its part.

Night docile but not tactile

Note that during the night, the display turns off, creating no disturbance during sleep.

Still, if you want to know the time, you have to press the small dedicated touch button above this display.

An operation which, in complete darkness, proves difficult.

On the one hand Aloha is a small object that you have to grope for on your bedside table, on the other hand, this button would perhaps have deserved to be slightly backlit so that it can be distinguished.

We would also have appreciated, in the event of a nocturnal sunrise, not having to fumble again to find the touch button dedicated to ambient light.

We were therefore pleased to imagine that in a perfect mode, Aloha could have integrated a motion detector.

Passing your hand over the wake-up light, Aloha would simply turn on.

Dawn in music

To wake up at the end of the night, Aloha uses a function that is not new, that of a classic wake-up light.

30 minutes before the scheduled wake-up time, the Aloha dome slowly lights up and fades from blue to white, simulating the breaking dawn.

It is possible to couple this function with one of the six musical notes offered and stored in the device.

All are soft and much less violent than those that we most often embark on our smartphones.

Better equipped competitors

Obviously, it is very difficult to quantify the exact effects that Aloha had on our sleep during our week of testing.

If it suffers from ergonomic problems, the device nevertheless allowed us to relax before falling asleep, but also offered us two or three gentle awakenings thanks to its dawn simulator.

Sold for 79 euros, Aloha will still find it difficult to compete against competitors like its elder Homni, now sold for 99 euros, but which offers much more through an application.

Or like the Philips HF3531/01, a wake-up light sold for 123 euros which is more advanced with, in particular, FM radio and two independent alarms.

But Aloha's real rival does not say its name: sleep-oriented, Google's Nest Hub 2 acts as a wake-up light with analysis of the quality of our nights, a personal assistant, an extra screen and control center for the connected home.

And it is only sold for 20 euros more than Aloha, or 99 euros.

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  • Sleep

  • Health

  • 20 minute video

  • high tech

  • French Tech

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