Show HN: weekend project, an attempt at a simple bed time calculator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: weekend project, an attempt at a simple bed time calculator

waketimes.com

38 pointsriskish30 comments

I think the typography and design are easier to read than http://sleeptyi.me, but it is uncomfortably similar wording and navigation if they're not made by the same person.

http://sleepyti.me/

What if I don't fall asleep exactly when I should?

For instance, let's say I had to get up at 8AM. The recommended times are:

11PM 12:30AM 2AM 3:30AM

What if I go to bed at 10:40 but don't fall asleep until 11:30? I'd be in between sleep cycles, right? And am I correct in assuming that the closer I fall asleep to when it recommends, the less groggy I would be in the morning?

I tried out the Wakemate a while back but it wasn't syncing with my Evo and I had to get a refund. It was a shame because I really want to get better sleep somehow and the Wakemate seemed to best product out there. I'll try the Lark when they have an Android app.

Most people don't take 50 minutes to fall asleep unless they've just slept. It's been a while, but I believe the well-rested person carrying no sleep debt (according to Maas) takes about 20 minutes to fall asleep. If you're over-exerted (as most of us are), it should take less time than that. You just need to time this stuff properly, and get a sense for about how long it takes you to fall asleep.

Also, the 1.5 hours between sleep cycles isn't completely accurate - but it makes more practical sense to time it this way. Add to this, that not everyone has the same internal functionality, and you have a really complicated problem. Everyone needs a different amount of sleep each night, and I believe the cycles are different as well.

However, if you wake up around the times it suggests, you have a higher chance of feeling better. It doesn't ensure anything, but if you were going to wake up around that time anyway, might as well adjust 10-20 minutes for a better chance.

Interesting, I'm currently working myself on a mobile friendly clone of http://sleepyti.me/

Because using either of the two sites is not easy on a small screen. And who has his laptop with him when lying in bed and checking the wake up time.

> And who has his laptop with him when lying in bed and checking the wake up time.

Me! ^

I'm a poor college student with a dumb phone and a single room. My laptop sits on my desk, which is in the same room as my bed. Unless your mobile version works on an 07 Motorola Razr, and doesn't require a data plan, I can't use it. I assume this is not the case, so if you want to cater to my demographic, please make sure the site is usable through a normal browser without a touchscreen.

Note that my demographic isn't likely to drop a lot of money on an app that does this, but I'm not sure it's worth much at all.

^ OK, so I actually use a normal alarm clock and I get up and go to bed at the same time every day (calculated with this in mind).

Same here, I'm also a poor student with a really dumb phone :-)

I just think the majority would use such a site on their mobile. That's why I go mobile first. And I won't charge money, it's more like a little side project to try out new stuff!

What if you text it "Goodnight" and it responds with your alarm times? Easy to use, no data plan, and should be relatively simple to code.

What if this was taken one step further and integrated with an alarm app for your phone? That would be a more useful implementation of this idea to me than a web page would be.

You could provide a time range of 60 to 90 minutes of when you need to get up, then press a button on the app to "set" it when you go to bed. The alarm could then figure out when the best time would be for you to get up in your provided time range.

Granted this assumes your audiences bed time varies from day to day, which probably isn't the best for someone trying to get the best sleep in the first place.

You could also do the reverse, set a wake-up time and have an alarm go off as a reminder for upcoming bedtimes...

Hope it's OK to post this here, but the "Sleep as a Droid" App, which does what you describe and so much more, really changed my life for the better.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.urbandroid.sleep

The YC 09 startup WakeMate (http://wakemate.com/) took this much further: (Edit - Took down my run-on sentence describing them, here's their pitch)

The WakeMate is a comfortable wristband that you wear when you sleep. It measures subtle body movements—a scientifically proven method (Actigraphy) to map dips and peaks in your sleep cycle. The wristband communicates directly with your mobile phone to calculate the ideal wake time closest to your alarm setting. When you wake up, your night's sleep data is automatically uploaded to Wakelytics™, our online analytics platform.

Their blog (http://blog.wakemate.com/) and live support seem to be down at the moment. Anyone know how they're doing?

I do not know if wakemate made any improvements lately but after giving it a try several times after I got it, I gave up. It sits in a box alongside old power adapters and other cables.

The main problem for me was when I toss and turn at night, it loses contact with the phone (sitting on the end table) and starts screaming 'Lost contact, lost contact'.

If I continued to use it, my wife would have thrown me out onto the patio to sleep.

There were several other occasions where wakemate never woke me up.

I would have loved to see wakemate work, I wanted to root for a startup, see them succeed. You only get so many chances with a single customer. In my books, they failed badly on their promise. continuously. starting with their delivery of the product and then later with the product itself.

Have you seen http://sleepyti.me ?

Wow, no locale detection.. telling me what time to go to sleep in US times when I live in Europe is pretty crappy for a web app.

Never thought of that, good point. I usually just do the "find out when to wake up if I go to bed right now" mode. I'm assuming that works for you, since they use javascript to determine your time.

I think finding your individual recipe for a good night sleep is really important. From what I have read people seem to have their own patterns etc. If the app also had some kind of feedback/tuning system so you could use it as a tool to find your perfect routine, this might be great...

TYPO: "try to get into bed around 15 before one of these times" - change to "15 mins"

Bug: If I do not select a value for the 'minutes' field, the suggested bed times are 12 hours off.

Suggested quick fix: Set the default 'minutes' value to '00'.

done

It's not likely I'll go to sleep now. It'll be in half an hour for me personally, it varies between people. You might want to add a box called something like typical time from computer to sleep.

An interesting idea, but I think the other way made more sense. I'm going to go to sleep when I'm tired. Waking up should be done according to the rhythm.

Not meant to be a petty criticism, but the shade of purple used hurts my eyes after looking at it for 3 minutes. Just something to think about.

The form is partly obscured in a narrow window. I'd remove the negative margin-left from #bedtime_calc in the CSS.

And 24h clock would be nice.

Constructive criticism: change "goto" -> "go to". Unless you're targeting programmers. :-)

This is really nice. Simple. Could you make one for parents of infants and toddlers? :)

clickable: http://www.waketimes.com/

Needs scientific proof to users at the page. Otherwise looks too meaningless.

dumbest thing i've ever seen. do people really need an app to tell them when to go to bed??

Potentially. A full sleep cycle is approximately ninety minutes in length. If you wake in the middle of the cycle, you take a cognitive performance hit for the rest of the day. So, in some cases, sleeping for thirty fewer minutes can lead to higher subsequent alertness. This is a crucial consideration when you're only allowed to get a few hours of sleep at a time.

Case in point: I've known a number of individuals with highly variable sleep schedules imposed by their work who performed this calculation manually. I imagine that they would find an application or a cycle-aware alarm clock on their phones to be quite handy.

Aside from that, calling someone's work the "dumbest thing you've ever seen" is both unnecessary and probably untrue. Please don't be uncivil.

I say call a spade a spade. This is dumb and perhaps only useful to obsessive compulsive individuals who feel some need to micromanage every aspect of their life.

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