Jan 26
Sleep Cycle
Sleep Cycle is an app for the iPhone & iPod Touch which has been getting a good bit of media attention recently. Then again, it’s not exactly your everyday game or list application — it measures how deep you sleep is throughout the night and wakes you up when it senses that you’re in your lightest phase of sleep.
How?
It’s quite simple — almost deceptively so, and this is where the rumours/accusations of it being fake stem from — using your iPhone’s accelerometer (the thing that detects if you’re holding the phone in landscape versus portrait mode) to measure how much you move throughout the night, it places your sleeping habits in one of three categories: Deep Sleep, Dreaming and Awake.
That’s all it is. You place it beside your pillow (behind your head) when you’re going to sleep and it does the rest. Those afraid of being woken by calls can solve this by putting their phone on airplane mode.
The second feature is that it wakes you up. “Oh.. great!” I hear you say. Aha, but, does your alarm clock wake you up at a set time, and you virtually always feel crappy because you were in a really deep sleep?
I thought so. Nevermore, thanks to this app. Because it knows how deeply you’re asleep, you give it a window of time in which to wake you up (for example: no earlier than 7am, but not later than 7.30am) and it chooses a spot where you’re very lightly asleep — and thus you don’t feel like crap getting out of bed. It also wakes you up gently – gently lilting noise which gets increasingly louder.
You can see screenshots of the graphs in the posts – my first two nights using it. I slept soundly the first night (I was even comatose (as I call it) from 5am-7am) but the second night was a pretty crummy sleep. My iPhone’s currently in Irish, if you’re wondering why it’s not English.
The app is currently only 79c on the App Store. Click here to buy it while it’s on sale. (iTunes App Store link)
I’m not involved with the developers of this app; they didn’t ask me to review it
January 26th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
I’ve not read a better explanation of this app, thanks Tommy, gonna purchase this and try it out.
January 26th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
I’ve been using this for a few weeks – though, due to the fact that it really needs to be plugged in to run all night and I don’t have my charger at the min, i haven’t done it enough consecutive days to do a post on it. Also I don’t really understand it’s alarm… How does it wake you up when you aren’t in a ‘deep sleep’ and also wake you up at the set time? If you’re really really tired and ’shouldn’t’ be woken up at 7am will it not go off?
January 26th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
@Sinead awesome stuff! :)
@Phil Well you set the alarm for when you tell it to – 7am is just when I set it for :)
January 26th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Tommy, I wasn’t even looking at the fact that you had set it for 7am, but just making up a random time. I meant in the way it wakes you up when your body is ready to be woken up – how does it know this, and what if, at the time you have set, your body isn’t ready.
Apparently though it gives a window of 30mins before the time you set and if you’re in a ‘waking up’ state at 6.50am when alarm is set for 7am, it will wake you up then. Or at least that’s how I understand it.
January 27th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
I’ve been testing this app for a while now and i have to admit it works, but I didn’t like all the hassle before going to sleep. i then went and bought myself an axbo one (www.axbo.com) and it’s even better. it’s way less hassle with the charger and the linen and what not, and it’s more precise too. I can only recommend it.
January 28th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
[...] seeing as it’s such an interesting subject, even more so when it’s related to technology. Tommy Collison wrote a great post this week about an iPhone app called Sleep Cycle that helps you wake up more [...]
January 30th, 2010 at 1:15 am
Tommy,very interesting post…well anything to do with sleep catches my attention. Seems you are a late bird and have a better nights sleep as a result..but judging by times of your posts you are also an early bird…careful not to burn both ends of the candle..
January 30th, 2010 at 1:35 am
i think i need one of those but i dont have an iphone my mums ofered to get me one for my birthday should i get it