My new watch, and how it's supposed to help me sleep.

I've always found it hard to fall asleep, and even harder to wake up in the morning. I hate beeping alarms so much that whenever I hear anything beeping that even remotely sounds like my alarm, I get this dreaded feeling in my gut, and think that I've been in a dream and it's time to wake up. But I can't ever wake up when I set it to a radio or CD alarm. I'm one of those people that will hit the snooze alarm for an hour before I get up (and only then it's because I know if I sleep any more I'll be late for work). It makes it even worse when I set the snooze time for every 2 minutes. Then one day while reading my favorite blog Gizmodo, I read about the Sleeptracker watch. It looked really cool, so I went and read more about it on their web page. I really liked the idea of the Sleeptracker watched more and more as I read. And then I saw the price. I soon put getting it out of my mind, and forgot about it for a month or so. Then I got my bonus at work. I then decided to look back into the watch seriously. My other watch had broken a week or so before Christmas, so I was looking for a new watch, and this watch was going to help me wake up in the mornings, so I decided to go for it. It was probably a bad idea ordering it on Christmas Eve, cause it didn't actually arrive until Jan 4th.

So here's the idea behind the Sleeptracker watch; instead of having an alarm that goes off at a certain time, with a snooze feature, this watch actually has censors inside that monitor your body while you sleep, and can actually sense your sleep patterns. Instead of just setting a time to wake up, you set the time that you wish to wake up by, and a 10 - 90 minute window where the watch will monitor for 'almost-awake-moments' and wake you up during one of those. So instead of waking you up while you might be in deep REM sleep, the watch will wake you up during a lighter moment of sleep, when you will enjoy waking up more. Also, you can choose between a beeping alarm, a vibrating alarm, or both. The watch doesn't always monitor you body, only when you set it to. When you are going to bed, you set the 'To Bed' time to be half an hour after you plan on sleeping, and the watch will start monitoring then. The Pro model of the Sleeptracker can also hook up to your computer and show you a graph of your sleep patterns so you can see when you were in deep sleep, and when you had an 'almost-awake-moment', as well as the average time between your 'almost-awake-moments'.

I've been using this watch for just over a week, and it sort of works for me. Yes, it wakes me up at good moments and I feel good about waking up, but then I just lie in bed because it's so early, and then fall back asleep. Luckily I've been setting my regular alarm also, so that wakes me up at a later time. I think that in a couple more week I'll actually start waking up when the alarm goes off. I really like that it can show me on te computer what my sleep patterns were. It also lets you put in any factors that may have affected your sleep, as well as what mood you were in when you woke up. At the top of the data, it gives an average of all of your data, and you can view your worst or best sleep sessions, with separate averages for each. Here are my sleep sessions from the past week and a bit (click on it for a larger view, where you can actually see all of the lines!). The first little vertical line is the 'to bed' time I set, and each smaller vertical line after that is an 'almost-awake-moment'. The orange vertical line at the end is when the alarm is set for, and the horizontal orange line to the left of that is when the Sleeptracker is monitoring your body. When the horizontal line is white, that means that is when you are awake before the alarm time. On the right hand side are all of the different factors that might have affected my sleep (napping during the day, eating a late meal, drinking, drinking caffeine late, smoking, exercise, stress, waking up due to noise, waking up due to lights and waking up due to temperature).



As you can see, I have a fairly consistent 'to bed' and wake time (except for the weekend). My average time between 'almost-awake-moments' is pretty low compared to what they say on the Sleeptracker web page (average 90-110 minutes). Using this watch I'm slowly changing my sleep habits, and trying to go to bed earlier (guess that hasn't happened tonight, oops!). The watch doesn't help me get to sleep though, which is a big problem for me. Maybe in a few years they'll have one out that can do that. Until then, I'll have to figure out another way!