Iphone Apps Review: Sleep Cycle
Leave the first response April 12, 2010 / Posted in Gadgets
Iphone Apps: Sleep Cycle
Sleep! It’s a human requirement like oxygen, water, food and social interaction. The quality of a sleep has a profound effect on the quality of our lives whether we are willing to make the connection or not. So what is one of the best ways to ensure that we get the most out of our sleep? It’s related to our sleeping patterns and being woken up at the correct time during our sleeping patterns. If you wake up during the deeper phases of your sleep you can feel it and you may feel groggy for the rest of the day. But wake up from a light sleep and you can wake up feeling pleasantly refreshed and ready to tackle your day with full force. But how do we ensure we wake up at the correct time of our sleeping patterns. Well, that’s where the next application comes in.
The name of the application to help you to wake up at the correct time is Sleep Cycle. The roots of my excitement stretched back to 7 years ago to a far more expensive product called SleepTracker that was based on the same principles.
The concept basically involves placing SleepCycle face down in a place on your mattress that you’re least likely to knock it. From here, the accelerometer picks up movements you make during your sleep, even relatively subtle moves. From here, it can tell at what phase you are in your sleep. You set the Sleep Cycle alarm for the latest time that you would like to be woken from and anywhere up to half an hour before that time, if it you are in light sleep it will wake you.
It works fantastic! Even better then expected. I was so excited by the graph it made of my sleep and there were moments I have remembered waking up during the night and there it is on my sleep graph.
The first night I used it, the application woke me up while I was in deep sleep according to the graph AND according to the way I felt. This was because the alarm still has to wake you up if you have not fallen into light sleep within your specified half. After all, I don’t want to be 3 hours late for work just because I didn’t fall into light sleep earlier. This has occurred on nights that I went to sleep a little later then I should have so it’s been a fantastic tool to establish my ideal sleeping time.
The wake up alarms to choose from are very pleasant to wake to. Some people complain that they are not loud enough and I suppose this is a personal thing. I wear ear plugs to bed and with the iPhone at high volume I have no problems waking up to it.
At the end of the day it is up to you what time you go to bed, how many hours of sleep you choose to get and the patterns you choose to establish but SleepCycle is a fantastic aid for anyone looking for some help on establishing better sleep patterns and waking up in a state that will kick off the day in the best way.
Related posts:
