Lee Jordan – Midlands Web Developer Web Development, Photography, Media Production, Social Media Collaboration and Marketing
Better Sleep? There’s an App for That!
Got a sleep disorder? Yup there’s an app for that too! One of the great things I love about the iPhone/iPod Touch is the range of applications around. Sure you can only use one at a time, but whoever thought an iPod could help you analyse the movements you make in your sleep and use that data to wake you up at the best time? The kind of movements that are used by professionals in part to diagnose sleep disorders?
Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock from LexWare Labs AB and downloadable on the App Store is amazing. It uses the accelerometer in the game changing device to detect movements as you sleep, using this data it plots a graph of how long you’ve been asleep and the likely moments you dropped in and out of deep sleep. I didn’t know this but if you wake up at the wrong point in your sleep cycle you can actually feel more tired than if you had woken up at a better moment in the cycle. So this alarm calculates the best time to wake you up in a 30 minute time window, rather than waking you up when you wanted let’s say 8am, it’ll choose the best moment, for me this morning that was 7:30am, even though I had set it for 8!
Having had a long history of sleep problems, of which I might actually need to go under a professional sleep study soon, I thought yeah why not it’s less than a quid to download! I love stuff like this, really great ideas! I charged up the iPod fully, tested it to see if it picked up movements, which it did and so for the past few nights I’ve been able to track the hours of the night when I’m likely to have woken up without knowing. The graphs are staggering and really interesting. I’m finding that rather than a smooth regular sleep cycle, mine is all over the shop when I’m asleep and it’s barely registering deep sleep for any lengthly period of time.
Here’s an example, it’s not my graph, but shows something similar, more examples.
Find out more at the sleep cycle app website
Posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
I understand there’s an app to tell you if your shoes are on !
[...] Recommended iPhone Apps for Sleep I’ve metioned the excellent Sleep Cycle App in a previous post but it really is helping me see how disturbed my night movements can be, but [...]
I liked this and other blog posts on your blog so much that I have subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed. Keep the good work going by posting informative posts. Thank you.
Sleep Disorders like sleep paralysis really disturbs me at night. I usually experience it when my throat gets dry.-,~