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Seems trivial because the user has to be wearing a device which monitors your vitals. Well, yeah, probably not too difficult to guess if someone is asleep or not. Do it without forcing me to buy a device to wear and I will be thoroughly impressed.

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Well, I could do it with a Kinect if you'd prefer. Or probably with a phone accelerometer - if you actually keep that in your pocket while you're sitting on the couch for an hour! But at some point the data has to come from somewhere.

If you're using a Fitbit anyway, an on-body sensor is going to be more accurate than not, and it's there.

My wife and I often watch in bed (bad for the circadian, we know) with an iPad, so the accelerometer would work great.

I understand the problem, I'm just saying, when you have a stream of data like this coming in then it's not a difficult thing to do. Nor would I see it ever having any practical application since, well, I doubt people will be hooking up to a fitbit so that netflix can pause their movie when they fall asleep.

I don't have a fitbit,but I've considered getting one. This might be a feature that would push me over the edge.

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