It seems you can stick “smart” in front of any household object these days and that’s what’s supposedly happened with a $1,750 mattress that catches out cheating partners.

For the sake of humanity, one hopes it’s a prank, but if so it’s an elaborate one, to the point of filming what’s purported to be a public test. It’s most likely a publicity stunt for a real mattress producer.

Either way, the hype is that the Smartress contains 24 sensors, placed in the springs, which will trigger a smartphone alert if the bed is being used “in a questionable way.”

At the moment the online “purchase” facility simply involves submitting a name and email address and awaiting further order instructions. The company has gone as far as getting an Android app in the Google Play store, though it is showing up as incompatible with a Samsung phone, a Nexus tablet and a no-name brand Android box.

Whether such a setup would even work, let alone be useful, is somewhat questionable. Presumably it would have to measure the intensity of any impact in the springs in a way that, shall we say, distinguished between solo and duo activity.

Screenshots for the app suggest it’s possible to measure the duration of a “session”, the frequency at which the springs are activated, and a percentage rating for the intensity. That sounds more suited to a situation where both parties were well aware that the measurements were on and had chosen to gamify the experience.

There’s even a three-dimensional depth map of the impact, though unfortunately it more closely resembles the visuals of a marble and graph paper used in some explanations of the theories of relativity.