Okay Geek Farm
App of the Week: Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock
Nick Mahar 
There are few things in life I value more then my sleep but sleep is basically the most important. I love to sleep. I do it a lot, and our interactions will surely suffer if I did not receive a decent amount of sleep the night before. Sadly most of the time I don’t go to bed early enough because I though of a cool project to work on or video games.
I was browsing the app store for alarm clocks and I came across this little gem. It’s a mere $0.99 but I kid you not when I say I would pay $50 for it. In order to truly understand the greatness of this app, we have to take a test for a week like I did.
Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock works using the iPhone’s accelerometer to analyze your movement through the night. It detects your sleep cycles throughout the night and after a couple nights fully determines what your sleep cycles are. The average healthy human goes through a few sleep cycles through the night categorized into four different stages. The four stages include Drowsiness, Light Sleep, and 2 stages of Deep Sleep that includes dreaming.
So now that you understand these stages, you must also understand that there is a period when it is natural for the body to awake, and there are periods when if awoken, vital parts of your sleep cycle will be missed and you will turn into a flesh eating zombie. What the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock does differently for you is actually determine the most opportune time to wake you based on your body movements. You set your wake up time on the alarm clock and sleep cycle will pay careful
attention to your body movements in the 30 minutes up to that specific time, and determine when is best to wake you up with a tune that gently caresses your ear drums.
The app works. I NEVER wake up the first time my alarm goes off. For the first week I used this alarm clock, I rose the very second the alarm went off feeling like I had just slept for an entire day. It’s unbelievable. Maybe it’s just something in my mind, but if it is, then I’m just fine with that because it works. This app is not a substitution for a good night’s rest. It is helpful on nights that you don’t get quite as much sleep as you wanted, but it’s definitely not going to trick your body into thinking you got a solid eight when you only got four hours of sleep. I have tested it, and it will not make up for a lack of sleep.
The only problem I have ever had is that it somehow gets out of the app during the night and goes to the menu and doesn’t work. Because of this, i typically set 2 backup alarm clocks so i’m not late for work or school.
Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock is $0.99 and your won’t be disappointed, I was surprisingly not. It will help improve your mornings and help you cut down on those morning coffees.
-NM
