WakeMates are ready
blog.wakemate.com
blog.wakemate.com
a.) No description of what the product is
b.) No direct link to the product website
So now, after visiting that site, I know that Wakemates are ready. But I have no idea what a Wakemate is, and short of manipulating the URL by hand, I have no way to get to a website that will tell me anything about them.
Since I'm on an iPad, it's orders of magnitude easier to simply hit the back button and write this comment, before forgetting about whatever this product was forever.
Except for the one in the sidebar that says "WakeMate Homepage". It's under a big white header labeled "Links".
> Since I'm on an iPad, it's orders of magnitude easier to simply hit the back button and write this comment...
This is Hacker News. It self-selects for just hitting "back" and leaving a critical, half-accurate comment.
As a product company, having somebody actually on your website and interested in finding out about your thing is extremely valuable. It doesn't matter that it's technically possible to find a link to the homepage. The fact that it's not trivial, as in linked from the logo, is what we're discussing here.
If you have a blog about your product, every post needs to contain a way to ensnare random visitors who stumbled in from wherever. The ideal way to do this is a prominent sidebar or header with the product name, a 5-word description of what it does and why you need one, and a big shiny button labeled with your call to action.
That's the "product blogging 101" bit that I mentioned above. That's why these guys need to fix their blog. They're bleeding interested visitors, and that's a big deal.
Frankly, your comment came off a bit snarky and holier-than-thou, which is what I was responding to in the first place. The basic merits of proper blog-site interlinking and branding were not meant to be brought up for debate. I take no issue with your points, merely the manner in which you chose to deliver them. Your follow-up here was much more thorough and useful.
get intrigued, look around the page for a link to a product description, get frustrated, hand edit the url to just 'wakemate.com'.
There is no sidebar for me reading in firefox. Maybe it is some fancy script that got binned by my various anti-junk plugins.
Make some more prominent links, and it'd be great if you had a sidebar with an image of the product and a short description of what it was.
The questions
1. Is waking up at the optimal time (light sleep before alarm) shown to reduce daytime grogginess rather than just wake-time grogginess?
2. Is the continued waking up at the optimal time free of any adverse effects in the long run ? I did some googling to find answers to the above, but couldn't find anything layman readable or substantial. If I have to pay $60 for a product, it is really a pain to do the research myself.
Some excerpts
"subjects were presented a word list 1 min after arousal from different sleep stage ..."
"The most important finding from this study is that sleep inertia reduces decision‐making performance for at least 30 min."
If it makes me feel good just after waking up for an hour or so, then is it really that useful?
(Edit: Read the second pdf)
If I retain my daytime alertness, I think so :) Morning grogginess is pretty much the worst part of my day and I think $60 to make it go away is a pretty good deal.
1. The optimal wake feature reduces daytime grogginess only in the sense that it puts you in a better mood in the morning. Attacking daytime grogginess is something we address with the analytics portion of our product.
2. Yes it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. You are just waking a little bit earlier at a point where your body feels more inclined to wake up.
Your last question:
The optimal wake portion of our product is addressed towards people who don't particularly like waking up in the morning. If that isn't you then no, it probably isn't that useful. The other part of our product, the analytics portion, is addressed to those who want to improve their sleep quality so they can feel better rested throughout the day. It sounds like that is more what you are looking for.
tl;dr The WakeMate wakes you up at the optimal time so you feel refreshed and provides sleep analytics so you can maintain that fully rested feeling throughout the day.
There are probably legal issues with your claim as well. I'd just say that it's very unlikely to have adverse effects instead of "it is completely free of adverse affects".
The WakeMate wakes you similarly to how you would wake if you did not set an alarm. That is why it is very unlikely to have adverse effects.
Regarding your comment: "I think the original commenter gets that you're just waking up a little earlier, but consistently doing that every day isn't natural." It may just be because I'm familiar with the product but it doesn't seem to me that setting your alarm for 9:00am and waking at 8:55am can be construed as unnatural.
What is the size of the effect in the research?
"1. The optimal wake feature reduces daytime grogginess only in the sense that it puts you in a better mood in the morning. 2. Yes it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. You are just waking a little bit earlier at a point where your body feels more inclined to wake up."
Two claims. No data from either published literature (from other studies) or their own data. How do they even know it works? Why should we treat it any differently than claims of magnets improving your sleep? A free pass shouldn't be granted just because they are YC.
The research-grade equivalent of wakemate is called actiwatch ( http://actiwatch.respironics.com/ ) and it costs a lot more.
The WakeMate costs as much as a week of coffee from a café – try it out.
When you don't maintain a regular schedule (or you're in sleep debt), your body can't do that. So your alarm may start buzzing in the middle of "deep" sleep, and you get stuck with sleep inertia.
Smart alarms like this try to compromise by waking you up in "light" sleep, or ideally in moments of wakefulness that you'd otherwise pass up and go back to sleep.
(If you're not familiar with the concept of sleep cycles: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_s...)
Thank you for your suggestion though.
All that I knew about it when I clicked the link and skimmed the page was: - They're ready - I skipped some stuff about pre-orders - I might not be able to get one before Christmas - When you make them, they're all arranged in a big tray, are charcoal and light blue - The manufacturing process somehow involves baking and cutting.
I had to click in my url bar and type in "wakemate.com" before I got anything useful. It's a fuzzy bracelet, it has something to do with waking you up and making you feel better, a few platforms like iPhone, some video I don't have time for, and I finally read "Wake up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle."
That sentence should be the first thing I read.
At first I was dubious that I'd be less groggy when waking up with the device, but now I'm absolutely convinced. I even bring the WakeMate when I travel, to ensure I wake up in a fresher state (which also revealed to me that my sleep quality is better from hotels).
I loved sleep activity graphs in Brain&Behavior bio in college, wish I had heard about this earlier.
Also, have you identified anything that benefits your sleep schedule? The site hints at things like exercise to benefit and alcohol to disrupt, but do you have any anecdotes for me?
And one more: Can you identify different phases of sleep on your nightly graph?
Thanks!
You can identify different phases of sleep (REM, etc.)
And the tagging is indeed the sweetest thing IMO, but you probably need a lot of the data before making a good conclusions. I found that I actually sleep really well when I'm sick or when I'm sleeping on the left side of the bed. Weird stuff like that.
International pre-order, I sent paid my paypal deposit on 24/nov/2009, the refund came through -- but I'm not getting any emails. (Doesn't seem to be in gmail spam either)
It's a bit disappointing about the international shipping. I'm not sure how this snuck up on them so late in the game.
Shouldn't this have been foreseeable? What happened to cause this mistake?
Depending on the type of bluetooth radio packaged internally, the device may have needed FCC-type registration. Of course, an FCC ID is only good in the USA. In Europe, you need a CE mark. Australia sometimes insists on yet another registration for 2.4GHz equipment.
Honestly, international RF regulatory certification is a mess, and the piles of paperwork involved make it easy to miss deadlines.
If you want the optimal wake feature to work you need to leave the app running. If you just want to collect data and wake up at a predetermined time you can background the app. Unfortunately this is a limitation imposed by iOS.
I can't answer for the original poster, but for me...
At night is when I charge my phone and there isn't always a plug near where I sleep.
Having my phone have to run at night without a charge will mean it's not fully charged at the beginning of the day, which is a very big deal breaker for me. My phone will last the entire day, but only if it's fully charged when I get up in the morning.
As a person who pre-ordered the phone, that is appreciated very much:)
So with Wakemate, if it could run in the background with no need to be plugged in and screen shut down , relying on notification, that would be a great improvement.
I wanted to chime in on this. I may not use my phone at night, but it is certainly receiving notifications and SMS messages throughout the night. This means that with any iPhone alarm, I have to go through numerous close dialogs just to get to my alarm in order to turn it off. A minor annoyance, but the wrist band helps. Otherwise, I'd have to go through my settings and disable notifications prior to going to sleep so as not to disturb me. <-- Heavy sleeper
Another flaw I would think is the potential risk of radiation of having it on you all night.
Problem with these things is that getting psyched about a fancy wake-up technology is likely to create a placebo effect for a while, so I'll need to stick with the thing to see how well it works in the long haul. Might look into WakeMate if the accelerometer alarm thing is still working good after a month or so.
An interesting thing to try with these things is doing the Everyman sleep schedule with a 4-5 hour nightly sleep and several 20 minute naps every day, and attacking the most common point of failure where you oversleep on the nightly core sleep with the smart alarm.
1. Can anyone compare WakeMakes with that clock thing that tracks your eye movement by wearing an eyemask? The name of the clock escapes me at the moment, will edit this post once I remember.
edit: it's called Zeo
2. If I know I wake up at least once a night to use the bahtroom out of habit does this disrupt the wake-up system in any way?
WakeMate is cheaper, more comfortable, and easier to use.
Getting up in the middle of the night won't affect anything. Our analytics system will, however, tell you that you woke up during the night.
edit: Finally found it as the LAST item on the FAQ. I still think you should make it more accesible! Cool
can you link us to the paper you use to determine optimal wakeup time? or do you just use it on analytics based on user-generated reports.
I was reading through the Tour page and clicked the Actigraphy link. I supposed to get more information about it, as it matters for me a lot to see the technology which the product is based on. However, it took me to the About page and I fail to find any useful information.
Is this a mistake or am I mistaken?
Regardless, I'm glad they're finally shipping (for real this time?). I hope it is worth the wait.
The tagging system while sort of awkward to do right before you sleep, lets you categorize everything over time and see how things like a cough, sleeping on the couch instead of the bed or even a broken AC affects your sleep.
The price is dirt cheap for something this interesting. Get it!
There may be an interesting angle for married couples in doing so. I'm interested in the sleep-tech and prospects of "feeling better," but the thing that would be really intriguing to me is the idea of something that can wake me up without an alarm blaring, which my wife hates.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian-alarm/id330721657?m...
Anyone wants to try it, send me an email and I'll give you a coupon code so you get it free.
I'll trust that you have my email address, though there is a reasonable chance that the one I gave you when I pre-ordered no longer works. Regardless, if I get a Wakemate and no email I won't really care.
Edit: Just noticed there is a logout link, which I guess means I'm logged in but again I don't remember doing that. This is all quite clever if you actually have my email address.
1) The form I went through said $60 while the blog post says pre-order prices would be $50. From your explanations it sounds like I'm being counted in pre-orders, but it's unclear. I think I was in the paypal group that got the $5 refunded, but I honestly don't remember very well at this point.
2) Should I have received an email from you? Fyi I have not.
Obviously the alarm's only going to help if I set it for a window I know is before the kids wake up. Otherwise it's their voices that'll wake me. On work days, that would suit my usual routine. On the weekend, I'm not sure it would be worth it to forego a potential extra hour of sleep by setting the WakeMate alarm.
But it's still tempting, just to chart my sleep during the week and be able to measure the effects of caffeine, exercise, etc. I'll probably wait until there are reviews and testimonials from people who have used it for a few months.
I was tempted a couple years ago by a much more expensive product whose name I can't recall. I think it was $300-400. In contrast, it's pretty easy to take a chance on $60. Cool product, guys. I hope you're wildly successful.
I am not sure I'm interested in an optimal waking time because I tend to wake up without an alarm at pretty much the right time.
however, I'd love to view some analytics on my sleep cycles and such. It'd be nice to see a comparison of say Wakemate vs. Fitbit w.r.t the accuracy / tracking / battery life / etc.
As I've said previously, I actually don't even own the phone anymore that I intended to use this product with. I just hope for the sake of the company that this is the beginning of the end of their constant problems.
pre ordered back in April so looking forward to receiving sometime in the new year I suspect, as it will be an international order.
An optimal wake moment can be thought of as a "semi-awake" moment – the lightest point in your sleep. Waking at these times will result in minimal sleep inertia or grogginess. More info can be found here: The Science of Waking
Best of luck guys! As soon as the $30 in my wallet moves up to $60, I'll be on board.
This feels like an over-engineered solution to a problem that's easy to fix: switch to decaf. There's a reason you feel horrible in the morning, and it's not because of "sleep inertia!"
Sleep is very complicated. Just because dumping caffeine fixed your drowsiness doesn't mean it'll fix everyone's.
Another way to put it is this is premature optimization for those folks.
Hopefully Wakemate fits the bill. I'll wait for the initial reviews to come out. I'm excited about the future of health afforded by devices like these.
Incidentally I found the withdrawal symptoms to be nearly nil. I had some mild headaches for a few days, and that was about it.
1. Is the battery a rechargeable or normal battery that I have to replace?
2. Can I easily download my sleep data to my computer to mess around with?
2. Not yet.
Conjecture: I think it's more likely that the device is something of an accelerometer paired with a bluetooth radio that can nearly continuously feed the phone/app with movement data so that the app can decide whether or not to rouse you.
Rationale: The algorithm. Assuming they want to tweak their actigraphy parameters, if the algorithm is running on the wristband you're going to need to drop new firmware on the device. Field-flashing embedded devices is to be avoided at all reasonable costs.
Even given that OTA flashing is possible, why bother? The device has no means of waking the user without a phone in bluetooth range, so what's the upshot? I don't know that battery life falls into that category because the device would need some pretty serious upgrades, and cost would obviously increase:
- More RAM. Lots more. Enough to contain an entire firmware image during OTA and an entire night of sleep/movement history.
- More MIPS. Actigraphy isn't going to be as cheap as store-and-forward.
- A reliable RTC so that the device can ping the phone at the right wakeup time.
- etc.
If I was in their position, I'd build the device to be as dumb a peripheral as possible. Push the complexity out of expensive hardware and into software. I'd also probably have built in a sweet inductive charging pad, too, but I'm a sucker for shiny things.
Congrats on shipping.
Chrome 10.0.612.1 dev
Addendum: I'm totally still buying it.
I currently use the Sleep Cycle app, which uses the iPhone's accelerometer to detect motion while asleep.
How does WakeMate stack up against that app?
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian-alarm/id330721657?m...
It's a dollar in the store but email me at michael at programmablelife dot com and I'll give you a coupon so you don't have to pay.
Any ETA on international pre-orders (I'm UK based), notice I haven't received an email asking me to pay yet.