I was a bit surprised when my former college roommate told me that there was an app for the iPhone that would be worth the price of the phone even if it was the only app available. He proceeded to tell me about the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock app (developer site HERE). Now a bit of background, my former roommate is an epileptic and his sleep is very important to him, i.e. if he doesn’t sleep enough and take care of himself properly, he will have a seizure. With that being said, I am not an epileptic, but struggle to wake up in the mornings. I have good intentions of waking up early and reading or exercising, but when the alarm goes off I wake up groggy. What he described sounded like it could benefit me too. Best part the app is only 99cents, which great since similar products are going for $340 on Amazon. So, I figured I would give it a try.
The premise of the app is simple, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. It uses the accelerometer in the iPhone to detect your movements while you are sleeping. It uses this movement data to determine your stages of sleep and from that your sleep cycle. It calculates the best time to wake you up according to your sleep cycle within a 30 minute time frame of when you set the alarm to wake you up. Thus, if you set it for 5:30, it will wake you up at the optimal sleep cycle time between 5:00 and 5:30. If you want more detail, you can go HERE.
All I can say is so far, so good, and I only expect it to get better since the first couple of days the app is calibrating your sleep cycle. I have been up and productive this morning before my family has awoken. That’s not normal for me. I don’t know how much of this might be psychological from me expecting the app to work, but I’ll keep you posted … And, if you have, 99cents to spare and iPhone, you might want to go ahead and give it a shot.