Am I Awake Yet?

After a long hiatus from blogging, I want to share with you my latest experiment.

For as long as I can remember I have hated alarm clocks. This is probably because I tend to wake up feeling groggy and exhausted when my alarm rings, even after a full night's sleep. During college I faithfully jumped out of bed the instant my alarm started, as a self preservation habit. But in the intervening years I have become increasingly acquainted with the snooze button. Unfortunately, snoozing only goes so far. Unless I go back to sleep for multiple hours, I usually still feel pretty lousy when I finally get out of bed.

My latest experiment to combat this groggy morning problem is a new alarm clock, worn on the wrist, which tracks sleep cycles during the night and wakes you at an optimal time to avoid grogginess. It's called the SLEEPTRACKER.

According to their web site, the internal software uses an accelerometer to detect "brief periods of movement that are associated with almost awake moments or very light stages of sleep." Most people are unable to activate their muscles during deep (stages 3, 4) and REM sleep, so it seems the basic idea is to detect the type/quantity of movements that are associated with the lightest sleep stages in order to wake the wearer at the best point within a given time window.

Last night was my first trial run. The vibrating alarm seemed pretty subtle, and apparently it took about 3 minutes to actually wake me. But it did finally wake me up around 6:20am and when I came to I felt very alert, after sleeping about 7.5 hours.

Unfortunately, unlike most toys, I only get to experiment with this once a day. So it will be a while before I have definite data about its effectiveness. But I have high hopes so far!