Last week, Jason wrote a great roundup of 5 Alternatives to the iPhone Alarm Clock. Today, I want to review and share with you an app along the same lines but at the same time entirely different. It is called the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and is as the name implies an alarm clock to help you wake up in the morning. What sets this app apart from other alarms, is that it uses the built-in accelerometer in your iPhone to analyze your sleep cycles and wake you up at the time when you are the most awake, within a time window.
What are sleep cycles?
To fully understand what this app does, you need to understands the basics of human sleep. Contrary to common belief, sleep is not just a state of just lying still in your bed, waiting for the next day to come. Sleep is a much complex subject and quite fascinating as well. When you are sleeping you go through a series of phases that simplified is from Awake, through Lightly Asleep down to Deeply Asleep.
In a typical night, you move back and forth through these phases a few times. If you have found yourself being easily woken up in the middle of the night by a noise but not your partner, chances are that you are in the phase where you are closest to being awake although your partner is not.
How does all this apply to an iPhone app?
Aha! I knew you would ask me that. You see, in these phrases we move around differently. When we are awake we tend to move around more, even if it is just twitches it is something that can be senses and analyzed.
What Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock does is that it tries to analyze in which phase you are during the entire night by tracking your movements throught he built-in accelerometer in the iPhone. Before you go to bed you hook up your iPhone to the power cord and put it under the sheets of your bed facing down. You’ll also set the time you want to be woken up by and the app will analyze your movement to best wake you up within a half an hour (default setting) prior to the time you set.
The whole goal with this is that when you get woken up close to the awake phrase, you feel more refreshed and awake from the start. It will give you a happier and better start of the day. Should you however be woken up when you are close to deep sleep, you are going to be very tired, resulting in a bad start.
In reality though, does it work?
As a matter of fact, it does work quite well, with a few limitations. The first few nights that I set the alarm, I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that I was woken up slightly earlier than my latest time (okay, first time was almost half an hour) and felt very refreshed and wanted to get out of bed. This experience hasn’t stopped and is still the case for the majority of the nights, there are some mornings where I just cannot be woken up near awake and it has to wake me up regardless.
What I find to be very useful with this app is its statistics as it gives you a clear chart over your nights sleep. As I am a bit of a stats nerd, I find these charts great to figure out when I definitely should go to sleep in order to wake up in the best possible way the next morning. After using the app for weeks, I believe I now have a good idea of when (on different occasions) I need to be in bed.
There are faults…
As with any application, there are a few downsides to it. The first is one that cannot be corrected. Since the app relies on measuring your sleep through the accelerometer, the iPhone must be firmly stuck in your bed. This is fine if you have got a wide bed but with smaller ones you might find yourself a bit scared of sleeping on top of your phone.
I would also like to be able to export better charts to myself, perhaps combining them or looking at them more in-depth. As it is now, while the best thing about the app in my opinion, the charts are a bit clunky to use.
Conclusion
Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock is well worth the little cost associated with it. Waking up in the mornings is so much easier for me when using this as my alarm, instead of the traditional one. I believe that this is definitely the future of alarm clocks to do, measure your in-sleep activity and wake you up at the best possible time!
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Just a small note: you don’t need to put the phone under your sheets as this can be a hassle. I’ve been using this app for about 8 months and have had no problem just resting the phone on the corner of my bed.
I must say that I prefer the extra level of security of having it under.
I grabbed this for my 1st generation ipod touch. (yes, there are still 1st-gen users out there!). While the app generally seems to work as reviewed, the only donwside is that it isn’t able use the built-in system sounds for the alarm. On a device without speakers, this makes the alarm pretty useless. I’m still using it, out of curiosity, to see what my sleep patterns are like. It’s pretty cool for that, but I wish it could wake me up too!
I love this app. This does all it was designed to do, and nothing else. I find it indeed very sensitive to my movements at night (I also do not put it under covers, I am afraid I would forget to grab it in the morning). I also have no problem with it waking me up, either, I actually like the sound of the alarm- it is such calm and relaxing compared to standard buzzers
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I swear by this alarm clock! The only thing I wish they had was some type of backup functionality maybe a dropbox sync or something ! Does anyone know of anything ?