Sensorwake: Olfactory Alarm Clock | Hacker News Reader

Sensorwake: Olfactory Alarm Clock

sensorwake.com

18 pointsdsr1214 comments

Kind of suspicious. None of the media articles mentions anyone who's actually used it, and even the original Kickstarter backers have yet to get and try it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/222459303/sensorwake-wa... ScienceAlert also mentions that two earlier sleep studies found that various scents hardly worked to wake people up: http://www.sciencealert.com/this-scent-producing-alarm-clock...

>The perfume molecules detach and are transported by the air flow from the capsule (dry-air diffusion); a process without heating, keeping the molecules unchanged.

Seriously? It's a fan that blows air through a piece of paper with perfume sprayed on it.

The product is cool but this marketing is such garbage. And $110 plus $6/month is a bit steep for something that's about $5 in parts.

I was under the impression that olfactory cues are not reliable for waking up someone [1]. People in fires with broken fire alarms often won't wake until the flames and smoke are close/severe enough to harm them, way past the point of being able to smell a bit of smoke.

[1] http://www.vinparleur.net/IMG/pdf/Why_odor_alarms_will_not_w...

I think it's more common for business leaders to ask themselves "can we convince people to buy this?" than it is to ask "is the science totally sound on this?"

I agree with you, I was under the impression that smells are not effective at waking people up. However I've known many people to claim anecdotally that the smell of coffee or bacon are effective for this purpose. Maybe this varies greatly with the person, the smell, and their previous experiences.

So no waking up when you have a cold?

No waking up when you're deaf?

EDIT: but seriously how do deaf people wake up?

> but seriously how do deaf people wake up?

A vibrating wrist band (like https://www.amazon.com/Silent-Vibrating-Personal-Alarm-Shake... ) ?

You can set your phone on vibrate.

In addition to the other replies, there are vibrating pad alarm clocks you can put into your pillow case.

I use a dawn simulator for SAD / easier wake up reasons. Suspect they'd work equally well if I were deaf.

We use vibrating alarm clocks. If you're only hard of hearing, a regular alarm clock can still work as well. My favorite alarm clock had a vibrator and sound, but it also had a socket for my lamp to plug into, so it would wake me up in all 3 ways. Fantastic for waking up at 6AM when I just wanted to either kill myself or go back to sleep. (Sadly, when I was at NTID, the socket for the vibrator to plug in broke.)

If you use this for some time, maybe your brain starts to associate the scent with the upcoming wake up.

That happened to me after using one of those automatic coffee makers for several months. Then again, maybe there's more to it than Pavlov might suggest.

Obviously missing a bacon scent.

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