Sleep or not

Published on February 9th, 2010

Sleep and I do not have the most stable of relationships. In an attempt to understand more about how I sleep, and how evening routines affect my me, I have been looking at ways to record and monitor my sleep patterns.

Insomnia frequently lurks nearby and rarely do I find a night’s sleep properly restful. Elements such as stress, food, or inappropriate light levels, can cause my sleep patters to stumble.

For example: particularly during grey winter months I use a bright daylight lamp in my office to help in maintaining concentration all day. But should I lose track of time and stay under such light too late into the evening, I can find myself still awake at 2 am in the morning – tired, certainly, but sleepless.

Having tried, and learned from, various forms of sleep diaries, a very clever use of accelerometer technology in the iphone, might give me a level of understanding about my sleep that I never thought possible.

Accelerometers (movement sensors) are appearing in all kinds of devices in recent times. Unfortunately for devices such as the iphone, they are to often used for ineffective reasons, such as clearing content of a screen or throwing some dice, where a button would provide a more effective user interface.

Sleep Cycle has taken the accelerometer technology – which is quite sensitive – into a new area: to monitor your sleep.

Its primary intent is to act as an intelligent alarm clock. You set the alarm to your desired time, and the application monitors your sleep in an attempt to wake you during a period of light sleep, rather than deep sleep. If at some point up to 30 minutes before your alarm time, it sense a lighter sleep phase, the alarm will sound.

The instructions show how to place the iphone face down in the corner of your mattress near (but not under) your pillow. The application must run continuously, so connection to a power cable is essential. It is also placed under the mattress sheet to prevent it falling off.

As you move around at night, it senses movement in the mattress using the iphone’s accelerometer, and continuously records your sleep state based on those movements. Once the alarm sounds, it will store that data and provide a visual representation of your night’s sleep.

Of course, this is not as accurate as having electrodes stuck to your head (and presumably also attached to an appropriate monitoring device), but provides a genuinely useful understanding of one’s sleep patterns throughout the night.

This is my chart from the first night I used the application:

Sleep statistics for 03 – 04 Feb (Thu).
Went to bed / woke up: 00:00 / 06:00
Total time: 5h 59m

I have no way of confirming it’s accuracy throughout the night, but I do remember waking up at a sniff after 3 a.m. to look at the bedside clock. And as you can see, the chart registered that I was in an awakened state around that time.

Here’s is a chart from the third, and significantly more disturbed and less restful night:

Sleep statistics for 05 – 06 Feb (Sat).
Went to bed / woke up: 21:29 / 07:01
Total time: 9h 31m

A marked difference in the sleep pattern, and clearly reduced very deep sleep. (The cause of the poor sleep described in this chart was the result of staying overnight away from home, in a strange bed and strange environment, and after many hours of driving.)

The application allows direct posting of the graph and data that you see above to your facebook account, or export and send to an email address.

I would like to see one more thing added to this application: the ability to attach notes to a particular night’s data. This way I could record anything that might have affected the sleep pattern.

What will I get out of this?

In the past, my sleep diaries consisted of timing notes, activities and food from the previous day, and how I felt when waking in the morning. With this application I hope to gain some deeper understanding of the differences between good and bad nights of sleep.

Precisely how much this will help in day to day life, I am not sure. But having some grasp of that mysterious unconscious period between going to bed and waking will, I am sure, provide some comfort through understanding.

Tags: alarm, home, insomnia, iphone, sleep, time
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