Tommy Collison

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