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.