Orange is my favorite color

We bought a fancy tempur-pedic mattress not long ago. At first I was sleeping like a baby. Now I’m tossing and turning again. I don’t think it’s related to the mattress, which is great, but rather my own sleep cycles, stress, etc.

I decided to get nerdy and I ordered a WakeMate. It’s a bluetooth enabled wristband you wear while you sleep that talks to your android or iphone. It records when you’re awake vs. sleeping and attempts to wake you up when you will be the least groggy.

wakemate personal sleeping tracker

This is my movement data from last night. I’m going to monitor for awhile before I draw any conclusions but it can’t hurt to try and improve the quality of my sleep if I can’t solve it through quantity.

4 Comments

  1. Ben Nadel said:

    on August 10, 2011 at 6:37 am

    I’ve heard good things about the WakeMate from some friends. I’ve been tempted to get one. But, I’m so neurotic about time, I get nervous about letting something else decide my wake-up time. How does it work? Do you give it a cut-off time and then it *may* wake you up before that time?

  2. Brian said:

    on August 10, 2011 at 8:01 am

    Ben, you’ve got it right. This morning I set my alarm to be 6:25 and it woke me up at 6:07. You can decide what the window is – I have mine set to 20 minutes so it could be 6:05-6:25 (but never later, as far as I’m aware).

  3. Ben Nadel said:

    on August 10, 2011 at 9:37 am

    @Brian,

    Sounds pretty cool. If nothing else, I think it would be fun / interesting to see how well or deeply you sleep. I find that I typically get up once during the night to go to the bathroom. But, I wonder how much tossing and turning I do. Some mornings, I wake up just completely exhausted!

  4. Brian said:

    on August 10, 2011 at 5:18 pm

    That’s how I’m looking at it – interesting, maybe useful. A lot of the sleep monitoring devices are several hundred bucks. This is $60 and uses your phone. Only downside is that the app seems to stay in the foreground so it eats a lot of battery. I’m going to start plugging it in on my side table at night.

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