I had been eyeing up the SleepTracker watch, and was pleasantly surprised to receive it as a present for my birthday from my girlfriend a few months back. The concept is genius: Why wake up in the middle of deep sleep, when you can be awakened intelligently at the right time?

Sleep happens in multiple stages: Drowsiness, light sleep, deep sleep, and dream (or REM) sleep. This cycle repeats multiple times in a night, and usually lasts 70 to 90 minutes. You can read more about sleep stages at helpguide.org.

Ever feel like you woke up at "just the right time"? After each cycle, you are returned to an "almost awake" state. When you wake up at this point in time, you feel much less drowsy, and much more refreshed than when you wake up during deep sleep.

That's the point of the watch: to monitor when you move (when you are almost awake), and wake you up at the right time in a given window. Ideally, you feel refreshed every morning, ready to jump out of bed.

How well does it work? Surprisingly well. After several weeks of use, I was almost always woken up during my set window. Waking up in an "almost awake" state is much more enjoyable than being rudely woken up by an alarm, and you do feel like you're woken up at the optimal moment.

What does it not do? It won't magically make you less tired. Just waking up at the right moment doesn't turn 5 hours of sleep into 8. You can shake off that "sleepy" feeling much, much faster, but you'll still need just as much sleep as before. It may be tempting to set the window to the maximum 90 minutes so that you're always woken up at an "almost awake" moment, but I found that sometimes the extra 90 minutes of sleep was worth it, even if I wasn't woken up at the perfect time.

As an added bonus, the SleepTracker Pro connects via USB to a computer to let you download your sleep data in text, csv or xml format, which can be almost (or more!) interesting than its intended purpose. With a bit of digging around on their forums, you can even find a perl script that works (easily) under Linux and (with a bit of effort) under OS X.

I've uploaded a couple weeks worth of my sleep data:

sleep.zip
File Size: 5 kb
File Type: zip
Download File

Here's the perl script (sleeptracker.pl) as well as a helper script I wrote (trackmysleep.pl):

sleeptracker.pl
File Size: 6 kb
File Type: pl
Download File
trackmysleep.pl
File Size: 0 kb
File Type: pl
Download File
 


Comments

Nivi

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:19:16

Is this useful if I don't set an alarm and just wake up whenever I wake up?

Or does the "wake up whenever I wake up" approach lead to waking up at the wrong time?

 

David Rusenko

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:50:19

Yes, it's still useful, but definitely less useful. If you go to bed at different times every night, you'll have to figure out how much sleep you want and set your alarm for that time.

I mostly "wake up whenever I want", and it tends to help me not oversleep (I have the tendency to sleep too much if I let myself :)

 

Matt Brezina

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:27:13

dude! I wish you would have graphed some of the data! Did you see any interesting trends? What was your average amount of sleep/night? Did you add data like how you felt each of those mornings on a scale of 1-10?

 

Amanda

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:53:21

Do you have any advice for Mac users that have no idea how to use a script? I couldn't find any complete programs online, and trying to read about scripts makes me feel moronic. So it's probably not something that'll work out for me? (trying to get into the data, I mean).

 

kevinseo

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:43:20

wow, very cool. downloading and will have a try

 

Ian Cheung

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:39:14

I've been interested in the sleeptracker for a while but I haven't found any long term reviews. Most have reviewed it after a week or a month.

I would love to hear how it works out for you and if it keeps working. My worry is that our bodies might adapt to negate the way sleeptracker works after a few months. Like how setting your watch/clock fast by 10 minutes or placing the alarm just out of reach works for a short while.

 

David Rusenko

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:20:38

@Ian:

I've always had trouble waking up in the morning, and the real struggle is actually getting out of bed when the alarm rings. Using the Sleeptracker for a while, I was woken up at a better time, but it didn't solve the "obey the alarm" problem.

In the beginning, the Sleeptracker was sort of the ultimate alarm, and I obeyed it every morning and got right up. However, I found that over time, I started ignoring it more and more, and even though I was feeling pretty awake when it went off, I would still go back to sleep anyway.

YMMV, and it would certainly be interesting to hear long-term results from someone on a fixed schedule (I am on a very flexible schedule, and have a widely varying set of times that I wake up).

 

Ian Cheung

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:18:18

Thanks for your reply David. I woke up this morning after 6-7 hours sleep and felt terrible. Took me 2-3 hours to get going. The Sleeptracker looks like it might solve such mornings for me.

Yes, the "obey the alarm" is hard to get around. One surprisingly effective mind-hack is to write down one thing you are *really* looking forward to doing the next morning before you sleep. With 2 caveats, one is that you need to actually write it down and not just keep it in your head, and two is that you have to resist the temptation to do it before bed. I'm about to sleep and my note is "I will wake-up to print out the Ruby tutorial"
YMMV but give it a try.



 

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Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:34:37

How much does it cost?

 

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Fri, 08 May 2009 00:29:17

I wish that my girlfriend also present me this watch because i am impressed by its specifications.

 

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Sat, 16 May 2009 05:33:23

Yes, the "obey the alarm" is hard to get around. One surprisingly effective mind-hack is to write down one thing you are *really* looking forward to doing the next morning before you sleep. With 2 caveats, one is that you need to actually write it down and not just keep it in your head, and two is that you have to resist the temptation to do it before bed. I'm about to sleep and my note is "I will wake-up to print out the Ruby tutorial"
YMMV but give it a try.

 

club penguin

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:31:52

I woke up this morning after 6-7 hours sleep and felt terrible. Took me 2-3 hours to get going. The Sleeptracker looks like it might solve such mornings for me.

 

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Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:21:21

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