Your journey to a better night’s sleep

It’s a feeling we’re all familiar with: being more tired in the morning than when you went to bed. So how do you wake up feeling rested?

You could count sheep, avoid caffeine… or you could do the smart thing and download Sleep Cycle: an intelligent alarm clock that tracks your sleep throughout the night, waking you at the optimum point within your sleep cycle – even if that’s slightly earlier than your alarm.

Sleep Cycle helps you wake up feeling refreshed rather than being startled into consciousness. The app has come a long way since its founder, Maciek Drejak, first strapped his phone to his bed as an experiment.

Having bought his first iPhone in 2008, Drejak quickly saw the possibility for its integrated movement-sensing accelerometer to help the world enjoy a better night’s sleep.

“If you wake up in the wrong part of a sleep cycle, you can basically ruin your whole day. I had trouble getting up and was fascinated by the concept that technology could be used to actually help you wake up better and have a better day,” Drejak recalls.

“With the first versions, I would duct tape my phone to the foot of the bed and do all sorts of tests. That didn’t work out too well, but when I tried putting my device in the bed things were much better. I realised that I could actually detect every little movement throughout the night.”

“I made a programme that logged all these movements. I would just put my phone in my bed and go to sleep and in the morning I was amazed because I could see there was movement in 90-minute intervals, which is fitting with sleep cycles. Immediately I felt like I was on to something because I was gathering proper data that correlated to real sleep.”

Having further refined the app’s sleep analysis, Drejak launched Sleep Cycle in July 2009. The reception was positive and immediate.

“I released the app and had no idea what would happen with it so I went on holiday,” he recalls. “I realised two days later that it was actually the number one app on the Swedish App Store.”

“That was a lot of fun but a lot of work. Overnight I went from having fewer than 20 beta testers to hundreds of users, so I had to fix a lot of problems during the holiday. Seeing the reviews and people saying how they were waking up better and that their life was better was amazing.”

Since those early days, Sleep Cycle has advanced and evolved. Having added user sleep graphs and stats alongside its smart alarm feature, the app has also been rebuilt about sound analysis rather than relying on your iPhone’s accelerometer.

The app can now track the intricacies of your sleep from your bedside table, allowing you to see everything from how much light and restorative deep sleep you’ve enjoyed, to the amount of time you spent snoring. And, according to the developers, this is just the start.

“Now that we have the sound analysis, it’s opened up a lot of opportunities for us,” Sleep Cycle developer, Niclas Flysjö explains. “We’re looking at how we can inform users about sleep disorders they might have and other things we can track through the night.”

“If a person is coughing a lot during the night we may be able to track that they’re starting to get sick.”

“You can tell by the patterns over time that someone is getting burned out or is close to becoming depressed,” Drejak adds. “Being able to detect that in time and maybe inform users would be amazing.”

Sleep Cycle - Sleep Tracker

Alarm Clock, Sounds & Recorder

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