WakeMate review
engadget.com
engadget.com
As he mentioned we fixed the bugs that we was experiencing. Also we should not that he was using an Android unit, which was the most buggy of all the platforms. The UX on the iPhone and Blackberry for review units, was much more stable.
The issue with battery estimation occurs when you do not fully charge the unit (as we indicated to him) and we are currently working on improving the estimation even further.
You couldn't wait a bit to send a final version?
I specifically asked whether devices were shipping to customers and you indicated that they were, at the same time that you sent me a replacement WakeMate unit. If this is not final hardware I reviewed then what is being sent to consumers?
Secondly, you never expressed any concerns about my testing on Android and I was quite clear with you about the issues I was having, and even delayed the review so that I could use a more recent version of the software.
Finally, when you contacted me and offered me a WakeMate in the first place the subject was "WakeMate review unit" and inside that e-mail you repeatedly used the word "review."
I'm sorry, but I can't cut any slack on a reviewable product that is shipping to customers.
I'd also ask that if you have further concerns you contact me directly rather than posting here.
Sincerely,
-tim stevens (dude who wrote the review)
MAN IN LINE: It's the influence of television. Yeah, now Marshall McLuhan deals with it in terms of it being a-a high, uh, high intensity, you understand? A hot medium ... as opposed to a ...
ALVY (More and more aggravated): What I wouldn't give for a large sock o' horse manure.
MAN IN LINE: ... as opposed to a print ...
Alvy steps forward, waving his hands in frustration, and stands facing the camera.
ALVY (Sighing and addressing the audience): What do you do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you? I mean, it's just maddening!
MAN IN LINE: Wait a minute! Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called "TV Media and Culture"! So I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan-well, have a great deal of validity.
ALVY: Oh, do yuh?
MAN IN LINE: Yes.
ALVY: Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So ... so, here, just let me-I mean, all right. Come over here ... a second.
Alvy gestures to the camera which follows him and the man in line to the back of the crowded lobby. He moves over to a large stand-up movie poster and pulls Marshall McLuhan from behind the poster.
MAN IN LINE: Oh.
ALVY (To McLuhan): Tell him.
MCLUHAN (To the man in line): I hear-I heard what you were saying. You-you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
ALVY (To the camera): Boy, if life were only like this!
[Alvy, fast forward to 2010 and Hacker News. It is now.]
(I don't mean for this comment to judge either person's opinion, just that I find it so interesting that you never know who's going to drop by Hacker News and join the discussion.)
And Woody Allen, too.
There'll be a new HN thread soon enough, and they always blunder just enough in each that their company stays at log(n) on the Cuil scale (where n is the number of threads).
Now we top it off by chastising a reviewer in public?
Really?
Your experience might contain some good tips or lessons learned for other Android developers.
In my experience (since I developed the entire BlackBerry app, and did a lot of work on making the Android app a lot more stable than it was), the apps are working great right now, and they get better every day or two. I mean, I push updates to the app VERY often, and our users have no problems with it, besides the occasional bug, which I generally fix in the following hours.
My only real comment on the matter is that writing code that works well with Bluetooth is REALLY hard, so if you can keep a persistent connection when the app is open, try to go that route.
One big problem with Android though, is that some of the phone manufacturers decided that it was a good idea to tamper with the standard Android Bluetooth code, so that caused (and still causes) some seriously problems.
Reference link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020811
Edit: fixed the link
The battery lasts about 2 nights, and knowing this, I recharge it every night. Since doing so, it hasn't run out of batteries during the night.
The app crashed a lot initially (I'm on Android), but that was months back and the WakeMate guys were good about using the feedback data I sent to fix the bugs. It hasn't crashed for me in weeks, since I installed their latest version.
Edit: I meant I recharge the wristband every other night, not every night.
In a couple of weeks/months when those specific bugs are sorted out this review will be absolutely worthless. I look forward to seeing a review based on how someone felt after having it wake you each morning for a while.
I know that personally there's nothing as disappointing as reading glowing reviews of a product's potential, only to find that I a paid good money for what should have been a pre-release product. Sure, as a developer there's always a push to just ship it and get some "traction" but the flip side of that is that doing so risks alienating customers (and reviewers).
If I'm a customer looking to make a purchase, what you're implying is that "in a couple of weeks/months when those specific bugs are sorted out this [product] will [no longer] be absolutely worthless." Is that really the standard customers should expect?
It's nice to see a reviewer as a customer advocate occasionally rather than just recite the bullet points of a press release.
REM atonia, a state in which the motor neurons are not stimulated and thus the body's muscles do not move. [From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REM_atonia#Physiology]
My dissapointment mainly is that I want to know if the whole concept actually worked, did he wake up feeling refreshed? All they seemed to do was harp on about the battery life. The only health comment was the snide remark about high blood pressure, which raised alarm bells until I realized it was a joke. They could have charged it just before bed and given us a review of its main functionality and then said don't buy it at the moment as its full of bugs, but the concept works. In the comments he said he usually got 2/3 days battery life out of it.
And this is just stupid: "The other big problem? Sometimes it's nice to wake up early and just lie all cozy in bed, dozing lightly and knowing there's a big world out there full of cold air, comforted by having 14 whole minutes left before your stupid alarm goes off and you have to put warm feet to frigid floor. " A big problem with the device is that you want to snuggle up and feel good about not having to get out of bed soon?
I would not trust a reviewer of a gadget site about that. I would not trust any reviewer in fact. This is a claim on people health and well-being and if you want to be serious about that you better try to publish some study with data rather than anecdotes.
I agree with the reviewers scepticism towards the usefulness of the statistics, but I am interested in buying this to make my mornings better, not analyzing my sleeping patterns.
Perhaps this review was just a fluke. And yes, it's a V1 - at least as far as feedback from the real world goes. But to me, a lot of the things that surprised him (that having a partner would influence the readings negatively, for instance) also surprised me. I would be hesitant to give something like this as a gift to a "mainstream" person (a "normie", if you will) right now - just because I would worry that WakeMate's manual/interface/whatever isn't yet ready to help my friend through any misconceptions they might have.
It rings very, very softly (user configurable for how long), and gradually ramps up it's volume.
This achieves the exact same objective of optimal wake time. If I'm sleeping soundly, then I don't wake up until it ramps up quite a lot, but if I'm already awake or just starting to wake up, I hear it quickly.
Those apps (I assume there are clones of the one I used) measure the overall bed movement to track sleep depth, and have worked very well for me. Will wrapping something around my wrist do any better?
Logging just the movement of the wrist is almost useless. It's better to properly monitor the different phases of sleep trough the night measuring brain activity.
I was about to pre-order a wakemate several months ago, but I had the same lingering thoughts above and canceled my order;
> There are a lot of people asking in comments whether the thing managed to make us feel more refreshed when waking up, and the simple answer is no. That's because, more often than not, the battery was dead by the morning or for some other reason the wristband failed to trigger the alarm.
Considering the wakemate had several delays prior to launch, looks like they should have let it bake a little longer...
I have my doubts about the premise that if people are awakened when they move their arms, they will wake up more refreshed. If Wake Mate has done studies showing this is true rather than personal anecdote, I'd love to read it.
What WakeMate refers to on their website as "Actigraphy" is a method that sleep medicine uses to measure sleep/wake cycles and circadian rhythms by measuring arm movements. I know it has been used during sleep studies, and some of the literature I read showed this, but the studies I read showed that Actigraphy was better used in longitudinal studies. People do tend to move around a lot less when they are in bed sleeping, and they move around a lot more when they are awake. But actigraphy seems to be especially uuseful in capturing data over the course of several weeks rather than during a particular sleep cycle.
I would love to read some research on this, if WakeMate has it. What I was able to find online were these references [1]. And, it seems like they are saying that actigraphy is much better at measuring cycles of wakefulness/sleepyness over long periods of time rather than measuring depth of sleep.
Also:
These limitations rely on how to decide if someone is awake or asleep (automatic scoring algorithms) and not on the activity measurement itself. However, regarding the sleep-wake pattern during daily routine, the actigraphy seems to add more naturalistic information. Thus, it might be helpful for monitoring sleep-wake patterns of insomnia, rhythm disorders, and inadequate perception of sleep in longitudinal studies. Actigraphy might even replace the self-assessment of sleep in some circumstances as it has been reported that patients with insomnia not only underestimate the duration of sleep but also overestimate the sleep latency.22 The American Academy of Sleep Medicine23 considers that actigraphy might help the assessment of the sleep-wake pattern of insomnia patients for extend periods, thus providing data not usually measured by PSG. [2]
From what I know, wouldn't measurement of rapid eye movements be better at providing data on when to people wake up?
That being said, I do think that you guys might have a great direction in home sleep measurement.
I have sleep apnea. I stop breathing or under breath to the point of rousing me from sleep about 30 times an hour. I've undergone extensive testing for this, and it's really expensive to provide that testing ($3000 to 5000 per sleep study). A lot of nurses that I work with know that their husband snores, and wake themselves up at night. But, those nurses have a very hard time convincing their husband that they need to go see a doctor about it.
If you could provide an inexpensive way to tell a person that they stopped breathing for 30 to 45 seconds at a time several hundred times a night. It would probably be a lot easier to convince that person that they need to go see a doctor.
/$0.02
ref:
[1] http://www.aasmnet.org/Resources/PracticeParameters/PP_Actig...
[2] http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:E06qD_EZLSYJ:w... pp 84
Updates: Clarification of some statements.
Go to eBay and search for "usb pulse oximeter". They're about $100. Wear it overnight (tape helps) while the software graphs your blood oxygen level.
If you have sleep apnea, at some point during the night, your oxygen will dip significantly and your pulse will spike at the same time. It is easy to see this event on the graph. Depending on how much of a dip there is, and how often it happens, determines the severity of your sleep apnea.
I have sleep apnea myself and have had a real sleep study done. I use the pulse oximeter at home to verify the effectiveness of whatever sleep apnea treatment I'm using at the time (cpap machines, different kinds of cpap masks, dental devices, etc).
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/New-Fingertip-Pulse-Oximeter-OLED-USB...
I may need to get one of these.
(I'm asking because you've given this a lot of thought.)
Are you still a trauma nurse by the way? You are my hero.
There's a big difference between steady snoring and interrupted breathing, even if you're not noisily gasping for breath. I'd say my quality of sleep is only about 15% better since I started using CPAP, a meaningful difference if by no means night and day, but I'm also less likely to die of a heart attack in my fifties or sixties.
When the brain notices it's starting to suffocate and jolts one into waking up enough to recover from an apnea event, it releases a small amount of cortisol, dozens or hundreds of times per night. That's the source of the long-term cardio risk, as I understand it.
I'm still working ER in a lovely part of Silicon Valley. I stopped doing trauma several years ago. With any luck, I'll be able to stop boot strapping in the next 6 months, and leave nursing behind for good.
re: sleep apnea
The problem with Sleep Apnea, is that you adjust to how you feel. I thought that one of my biggest problems was the shift work that I was doing. I would have jags, where I would sleep 4 hours, and then be up for 12 to 16 hours. Turned out, after a couple of sleep studies I was waking myself up after 4 hours because I was suffocating repeatedly while I slept. When I woke up after 4 hours it was because my body had jolted itself awake with a surge of adrenalin, because I had desperately needed oxygen.
Sleep apnea is correlated quite highly with nasty long term diseases like pulmonary hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and obesity. Your whole cardio vascular system is over worked because it struggles with oxygen deprivation for 1/3 of each day. It also messes with your endocrine system (stress hormones, insulin production, adrenalin production, etc...) because your body isn't able to get a full 8 hours of rest and recharging. Instead, it's is constantly stressed ( releasing adrenalin and cortisol) throughout the night, and it leads to things like constant hunger throughout the day.
Since getting treatment, I've lost about 30 lbs, my blood pressure has dropped 20 points. A bigger personal benefit, was that I found that I was able to get into programming flow a lot easier (not as fuzzy), and I was able to program for several hours at a stretch longer than I was able to 2 years ago.
And, I find that I don't need to have a cup of coffee to get myself through the day. I don't drink caffeine at all, now.
Were you regularly tired? What finally pushed you over the edge to look into sleep medicine? I'm wondering if there's something symptomy I should be looking for.
Note that 51% of Wikipedians believe that "The hallmark symptom of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome in adults is excessive daytime sleepiness. Typically, an adult or adolescent with severe long-standing obstructive sleep apnea will fall asleep for very brief periods in the course of usual daytime activities if given any opportunity to sit or rest. This behavior may be quite dramatic, sometimes occurring during conversations with others at social gatherings".
It's not "let's diagnose Thomas" day on HN or anything, but: nobody who spends any time with me during the day thinks I'm epsilon from falling asleep.
How did you end up as an ER nurse? How did the state transition from ER nurse to startup developer start happening? I've known about your profession for ages but never thought to ask about it.
Sleep studies are a bit of a pain in the ass, but the time I've invested in getting my sleep problems figured has been one of the highest ROI of most anything medical I've put myself through, including my cleft lip repair. I love my sleep doctor. They are crazy smart. They do a 5 to 7 year residency after med school. 3 - 4 years medicine. 1-2 years critical care/pulmonary fellowship. 1-2 year sleep medicine fellowship. They are generally happy doctors, because they have a pretty good lifestyle (High billing rate, 9 to 5 work week without call.) as opposed to other high end specialties like Cardiology, Intensivists, etc..
So, the sleep study is the unpleasant bit. Just be sure that you go to a sleep clinic in the richest neighborhood around. You'll get the best trained doctors and the happiest staff working for them. (Most of their patients have good health insurance).
re: Symptoms of Obstructive Sleep Apnea:
What you are describing is narcolepsy, which can indeed be a byproduct of sever obstructive sleep apnea. If you go to a sleep doctor, they will give you a battery of tests like "sleepiness scales", basic tests for depression, questions about your sleep patterns, etc... People with Severe sleep apnea (and concomitant narcolepsy) will fall asleep at very inopportune times. My wife's grandfather was notorious for falling asleep mid sentence. He died of Congestive heart failure.
I never fell asleep during conversations, but the likelihood of falling asleep on a long car ride when my wife was driving was extremely high. I'd also struggle to stay awake while watching TV with my wife in a dark room, and I'd occasionally fall asleep in a movie theater. I had always chalked my sleepiness to working the night shift for years.
The best symptom: Your wife tells you that you stop breathing when you sleep. :)
You're not going to notice much, because you are the proverbial frog in the kettle. You have been slowly adjusting to decreased oxygen levels, and increasing periods of hypopnea (under breathing) or apea (stop breathing) for years. As I said, I had chalked it up to working nights for years. It wasn't until my sleep disturbances really became severe, and my sleep pattern started interfering with work that I went to the doctor.
That being said, I was completely stunned with the results of my first sleep study. As a critical care nurse, I routinely intubate people (put them on a ventilator/life support) when their oxygen saturation (percentage of hemoglobin saturated with oxygen) goes down to 80%. Normal is 95 to 100%, and there's an exponential decay (read patients get much sicker much quicker ) after O2 Sats drop below 90 - 92%. [1]
I almost crapped my pants, when my doctor told me that my Oxygen Saturation routinely dropped into the mid 80's and the lowest it got was 82%. Meaning, that if I were a patient in my ER, and having symptoms of difficulty breathing, I would want to put myself on life support if those numbers sustained themselves.
Needless to say, I got busy and started to take care of things. What's amazed me most, is how much better I can focus on programming now. I'm also a lot "sharper" now, even though I never would have thought I was fuzzy before treatment.
re: nursing.
send me an email, and I'll be glad to tell you the story. This thread is getting a little too off topic. :)
Besides, I gotta run out the door and catch a plane.
ref:
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Oxyhaemog...
I was already getting straight A's in school and was captain of sports teams in high school, but the first night I slept with a CPAP machine after that study, I woke up and felt BRAND NEW. It was insane. My whole body from head to toe felt more rested and restored. My life has since gotten a lot better and I've felt more outgoing and healthy.
If you have any shred of a doubt I would get tested. Heart attacks have run in my family and I think it has a lot to do with sleep apnea.
True, the hospitals rip you off by charging $3000 or more; but there are privately-run places that will charge less.
The reviewer stated as fact that any arm movement during the 20-minute wakeup-window would trigger the alarm. I'm still holding out some hope, based on what I've read about it, that the device is not quite that easily convinced. Mine arrives tomorrow.
As with all cool things -- esp. cool startups -- a little patience can help. Greg and the WakeMate crew will surely continue to innovate and improve.
One so-so review is exactly that: one review. Plenty of other reviews to come.
I have a serious problem with sleep apnea, and if this gadget can help me wake up fresher, it's priced right for me.
Please, please, please see your doctor about the cause of your sleep apnea before treating its obvious symptoms with a device like the WakeMate.
First off, the battery is a non-issue to me. If it lasts 2-3 nights then I'll charge it every night like I do every other device I have, which is what most people do to my knowledge.
Second, if I'm trying to analyze my sleep statistics, I don't think I, nor anyone else can resort to pen and paper to effectively study several nights of sleep and the many factors to sleep.
Next, if you're sleeping with someone else and intend to wake up, how is the method in which the Wakemate wakes you any more intrusive than a regular alarm? In fact, it is a regular alarm. I'm sure he simply imagined a vibrating wristband and so was disappointed with a regular alarm. Which is fine, but, vibration could also just as easily annoy others. It's personal preference and not poor design.
Finally, what irks me most is that he complains about the Wakemate setting off when you're already awake. Complaining about this tells me he doesn't know what the Wakemate is. It wakes you up at the optimal time such that he feels refreshed. If he's already awake and wants to chill in bed, that's a personal preference. Though I personally would enjoy doing the same it is precisely this habit that causes me to fall asleep again and then wake up at a non-optimal moment and end up not feeling groggy. The point is to wake up refreshed and I feel he missed the point there.
On the other hand, a product's being new does not entitle it to soft treatment in a review. Even without the battery issue, it sounds like this device is not ready for prime time.
"The score is based on the failures of this thing to operate, not questions relating to data relevance or actual ability to improve sleep cycles."
Yes, as the device kept telling him it could last for longer. If I had a car that I found only really went 100 miles on a full tank, but kept telling me it was half full still, I would be pissed, and I would focus on that.
This is a gadget review, not a life review. You dont see their other reviews taking on how items affect your life, just the quality and appropriatness of the product. Why did you think this would be different.
In all, if I were reviewing a car that had this many issues I would not focus on what the drive is like, I would not be doing my job if I didnt address the failings of this item. It seems loads of people here want the reviewer to just ignore these issues.
What do YOU want from your reviewers?
Would it have been such a hard thing to do to charge the device once a day (as he probably already does with his phone) and report on the actual point of the device? We want to know if it wakes you up at the right moment, not if the analytics are useless for you and that you forget to charge gadgets.
That doesn't sound like user error to me.
It's user error to rely on estimates of 11 or 12 hours when you discover that you drain the battery faster than said estimates.
If the manufacturer tells you, "Hey your device will last two to three days depending on how much you move" and you realize that it only lasts two for you AND then you don't charge it on second days AND proceed to bash the product because "ohhh it kept running out of battery and what's the point of analytics hurr durr" you're officially a retard.
You want to complain in a review that the estimation of the battery life sucked for you, fine go ahead, I have no problem with that. But make an objective review and actually try to use the product instead of just using the first scapegoat excuse you can get to bash it into the ground.
If it had been a negative review because the product is bad I'd be the first in line to commend the reviewer for not spewing a bullshit from a product marketing sheet. That being said, this is not a good review, it's FUD all the way around.
Regardless, a hopelessly optimistic battery indicator is a bad thing.
iPod touch and iphone here, but if the devices don't even talk to the phone during the night, I don't see how that variable makes a difference.
Battery life being too short or being misreported means the device won't consistently work to wake me up, which kind of defeats the purpose of having something like the wakemate.
Not being able to associate my sleep data/patterns with events I know occurred during my sleep means that data is next to useless to me. I've used devices like this before to improve my sleep as well as to wake me up on time every day. If I didn't have a diary and good analytics for what I did use (which honestly, I haven't found yet so I'm rolling my own to use with an iPhone alarm clock-type app...if someone would come in and fix this problem and roll it into a nice device I'd be all over their product), I wouldn't have known a lot of information about my habits that affect sleep. For example, I wouldn't have known that it was my punctual neighbor's certain actions that disturb me every weekday at 9am, which meant that if I wake up after 9 I feel more tired and annoyed because I didn't sleep as well as I do on weekends after 9am. (I eventually worked around this problem and feel a lot more rested nowadays.)
Even the additional points the review mentioned about how it works with other people in bed matter to me. All these little things are things I think about when I look at purchasing gadgets like wakemate. Not everyone cares only about waking up...anything can try to do that from a $5 alarm clock to your phone, a significant other, and much more expensive gadgets. Wakemate has the potential to do more than just a dinky alarm clock, so I want to see what came of it.
Read the review again and you'll notice that the Wakemate does have all those things you want in an analytics package, but the reviewer dismissed it with a wave of sarcasm because according to him the only use for analytics and tags (for events, as you mention you want) are to tell you that you had a "crummy night." You will also notice that he states that the Wakemate works with YOUR movements as opposed to the movements of whomever you're in bed with, but he says this in a way that it's easy to misinterpret it the other way around. Immediately after the fact he starts complaining that the alarm might wake your significant other, which any alarm will do.
My point is not that the review speaks negatively of the Wakemate, I don't even own one and really don't care much about it, but the review was completely lopsided. It belittled every good thing the device has (the analytics, the tagging, the raw data, the fact that it works even with other people on the bed, etc) and made a big deal about something that not only is not a bug deal, but works exactly as is stated by the product manufacturer. Other than the pairing issues the reviewer had, the rest of the review read like a sarcasm ridden payed "anti-advertisement" against the Wakemate.
Or, get a pet which expects to be fed in the morning.
I've done most of the other parts several times; maybe I should make a packaged service in January. There are probably plenty of people with macs, maybe with big TVs attached, in bedrooms, with Internet access; adding the Zeo and some kind of computer-controlled lighting (optional) isn't much to ask.
Unfortunately having to mess with a serial port is so 1995. I wonder if anyone will make a simple serial to bluetooth dongle so the whole thing can be done from an iphone/ipad, or if it will end up with serial to usb to PC.
Why not make a sensor that clip onto your pillow? Then they could be powered by a wall socket, or at the very least have a large battery once you take the necessity of size and weight out of the equation.