Sense – Wake up when it's right for you
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But if the recipe was really that simple for all people, more of us would experience more success.
Humans are complex. Not mechanistically complex, stochastically. We're chaotic. One set of inputs may produce different outputs, and reverse-engineering the reasons for those differences may be "hard" or impossible. Apps and tracking devices can help reveal small areas where a fractional improvement in control or quality can have very large beneficial effects.
Lifestyles and other highly personal factors mean that the application of a simple single formula will be met with varying success. And anyway, you have to measure the outcomes to understand how successful the intervention has been.
I'd also point out that just because you feel well, it doesn't mean that your lifestyle or body (or mind) are healthy. Some attempt at objective data is useful to determine if you're really as healthy as you think you are. Sure, you may feel great if you get regular sleep every night. But did you know your sleep apnea puts you at increased risk of cardiovascular disease?
Edit: probably a better example... You may feel perfectly fine sitting down for several hours per day. But you're at increased risk of a whole range of diseases. A timer set to beep evey 20 minutes to remind you to get up and move may actually add years to your life.
This isn't a defence of lifestyle or health/fitness apps and so on, just a recognition that they work for some people, and for some circumstances. Or so it appears. This is the start of a vast, poorly coordinated longitudinal experiment. We'll be poring over the data for years yet.
You don't if you live within constraints which are healthy. Many people do not, because of their job, or because of the way their physical environment is set up - for instance, you may stand in a shop for 8 hours a day, and develop problems with your legs. The sensible thing to do is not to stand for 8 hours a day, but the reason why you may have done that before is because that is the expected, default behaviour. To change that so you are moving around enough not to cause damage requires deliberate and ongoing intervention, and something that tracks movement can certainly help with that. Likewise if you develop health problems from sitting for 8 hours a day.
Tell that to the thirty pounds I've lost, over the last couple months, by dint of using a Basis band to track calories out, and logging what I eat to do the same for calories in.
In general, I'm surprised to see such a Luddite attitude espoused on HN. What kind of engineer doesn't see the value in collecting the necessary data to characterize a problem or a process accurately? That's Step One.
The basis band you mention looks pretty cool though, going to check that out further.
I (a) wish that something like that was built into iOS and (b) feel bad for people who don't know f.lux exists (or RedShift, for Linux folks.)
Curious, why 10+ minutes of sun at noon?
http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-truth-myth-eating-ni...
I'm sure I've seen a few things like this in the past. I wonder if they could adopt it for use as a baby monitor? We do currently have a sleep monitor but that just sets off an alarm if she hasn't moved in 20 seconds (or I pick her up and forget to turn the damn thing off, grrrr).
I could see this being a really useful baby monitor that:
- sets off an alarm if no movement in 20 seconds (important one this, obviously)
- lets you know if your baby is drifting off into sleep or is basically just messing about and still wide awake. Like, are you going to be able to go to bed now or should you just make a brew?
- a recording of and detailed description of sleep patterns during the night, so you've got an idea of how to organise your nights; like maybe you could work out when she's more likely to wake up at?
- a history and some kind of comparison chart, because with babies it changes all the time, so you might be able to predict and adapt in advance.
- an advance warning of when she's coming out of sleep. Babies go from slightly peckish to screaming their head off hungry in a couple of minutes, and it takes 5 minutes to warm a bottle. Having a "she's gonna need feeding soon alarm" would be really handy.
The key is to not be inebriated or taking sleeping meds while doing so.
There are also co-sleeper attachments that make cribs accessible to mommy without having the baby sleep on the bed and thus not ever in danger of rollover.
Apparently the biggest risks (from what I recall) is the typical 'western' bed contains a lot of obstructions and places to get trapped: headboards, blankets and sheets, etc. Japan has one of the lower SIDS rates, and co-sleeping is very common there -- but beds are low to the ground, and I guess heavy bedding is uncommon.
[1] http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/health-concerns/sleep-probl...
Also, a good deal of "training" or learning has to be done for your child to understand when it's sleep time, and when it's time to eat. Just because your baby thinks he/she is hungry, or not tired does not mean you should accommodate 100%.
It's a constant give and take. You need to care for and console an upset child, but at the same time educate them so that they are able to sleep/eat at times that benefit them overall.
Sometimes that means letting them cry in their crib, sometimes that means picking them up and rocking them back to sleep.
The kicker is eat child is different, so no gadget can help with your particular child's tendencies.
Source: Have 2 kids.
They tell you it gets easier but it really does, honest!
I work from home so it's a constant thing. We also have a Golden Retriever who likes to run in and jump around and see what's going on when the screaming gets going just to add a little extra stress to the situation :)
Wouldn't change it, though. I know that's a cliche but it is true.
You really learn a lot about his patterns, movements, and you just feel him around. No need for monitors, setting things on/off, and no. We didn't suffocate him or squashed him. It was very natural to us (and him).
I can wholeheartedly recommend it to new parents, and I can honestly say I miss him around now that he sleeps in his own bed just next to ours.
Idea for testing it out:
get a cabbage patch doll, hard boil an egg and shell it, put the egg in a clear ziplock bag, and tape the bag to doll. Check if it's squished in the morning. You may need multiple eggs on different limbs, maybe multiple eggs per bag, to account for the full size of the doll.
You're playing the odds. Some children die because they get accidentally smothered in their parent's beds. You can either take the (very small) risk that this will happen and sleep with your child in bed, or you can just not play the game at all.
And for most, I think whilst the reward is "good", the failure is just unthinkably horrific.
Have you seen this? http://mimobaby.com/
I ultimately decided more monitoring (we have audio/video/nest) was not going to help us. But still thought this product was cool.
Like, 'cos when she starts crying I need to hear it in stereo ;)
Gets better. I am @ 13 months. Getting regular sleep between teeth coming in and bouts of illness.
I highly recommend eventual sleep training (interval or whatever)... just make sure you have plenty of whiskey handy... can take it's toll on your nerves.
>>> We all have a natural sleep cycle, but a normal alarm will wake you regardless. Sense’s Smart Alarm, knows the right time to wake you, so you will feel alert and refreshed.
This is the part I like best. I wrote a web application (http://sleepyti.me) designed to let people calculate their own "optimized bed times" based on when they need to get up -- in other words, doing what Sense claims to do, but in reverse. The problem, of course, is that if your dog starts barking in the middle of the night, waking you up for an hour -- or if your sleep cycle lengths are significantly different from the norm -- then the app won't work.
It's interesting to me, both because of the consistent traffic to sleepyti.me and the vast array of sleep apps and products, how neglected a good night's rest seems to be. I'm not sure if it's a cultural phenomenon or just a change in human sleep behavior, but everyone I know seems to be in a constant sleep deficit.
If you look at products like Sense, FitBit, Beddit, Sleep Cycle (app), Sleepyti.me, etc, you'll notice that the market is supporting basic human function in those that aren't generally ill. I think it's indicative of a more serious problem that we -- especially in science and technology related fields -- can't seem to make ourselves go to bed.
All of these hacks are great, and the metrics can be very useful... but in the end, nothing beats getting eight hours of sleep per night. Try it for a week or two; the difference might astound you.
Have you ever considered a responsive view of it so you can select your parameters more easily on a phone without having to zoom in?
Sure, I've got my cellphone in my bedroom at night and it's got the mic, network connection, and unknown software. But I figure there's a much better chance of someone discovering that Google or Sprint has installed a backdoor into my phone's OS or hardware that's sending recordings illicitly than there is of someone discovering the same thing about a niche product.
If the software was open (such that I could compile and install it myself if I wanted to), and the collected data was open and available to me too, I'd be a lot more inclined to buy this. Those changes would also create the possibility of an add-on developer community that could be constantly providing new software capabilities to the device, which makes it even more compelling as a product. For example, philbarr is asking about a bunch of baby monitor features; those could all be added with software changes, I'd bet.
This is one reason why I'm confused by the internet of things, is the model really going to be that we have pervasive black boxes sending continuous data feeds to god knows where?
If the NSA, CIA, a foreign government, competitors, your own company, your mother, etc. wanted to listen to you and other people en masse, they're going to be backdooring a piece of software which is used by more people. A niche product like this wouldn't warrant the time necessary to bacdoor/collect data.
1. You need the app running to collect metrics from the device (so, still some friction). I forget the app all the time; at the end of the day, I drop my phone on a charger and crawl into bed. Relying on humans to actively intervene is, unfortunately, suboptimal.
2. I was hoping it'd attach to my wifi and dump metrics to an API I could query (there's no smart alarm, so attaching it to my own stack of stuff seemed cool). Unfortunately, it sends data via a private Bluetooth protocol to your phone, rather than the wifi. Intercepting this is non-trivial (although the Android Bluetooth debugging stack helps). I'm trying to build a receiver on the Pi currently.
3. The API still doesn't really exist.
My use case is slightly different from others. I've got a chronic condition, and I'm not really interested in "did I sleep well last night?", which Beddit seems to have targeted. I'm much more interested in trends over a period of time, once my illness flares -- "am I waking up more often?", "how much time am I spending in bed, rather than active?", "over the past week, how many times have I gotten up -- should I see a doctor?". This should correlate with other smart devices (scales -- "how much weight have I lost?"; fitbit -- "am I still relatively active?") to give me a more holistic view of my health. So, long-term data retention is important to me (CockroachDB looks quite neat!).
Smart alarms and overnight statistics are interesting, but I hope companies developing devices for the quantified self start to pay more attention to long-term health data. It paints a far more interesting story :).
Unfortunately, there's no good API (and your choice of three variously lousy ones [1]), and it syncs in the same way as the Beddit does, i.e., via Bluetooth to a phone. (Or via USB to a computer, but that's not much more help.)
I've thought about trying to MITM the data on its way out from the PC to Basis's sync endpoint, in order to see whether I can trap it there instead of having to query it back out of one of Basis's various APIs once it's synced. On the other hand, I've already got > 1 month of data synced, so I'm going to need some method of extracting data from their backend in any case. (But on the third hand, since Intel bought Basis and Basis apparently doesn't bother much with new development any more, I figure it might be handy to have a backend for sync data in case the hardware becomes otherwise useless.)
[1] Two equally undocumented and unstable not-really-supposed-to-be-public APIs, for which various clients exist on Github in various states of disrepair, and a third, also undocumented but probably more stable, API which feeds their web UI..
I am using Fitbit and Basis is what I really need. I think by next year we will have something along the lines that Basis promised.
And I can't really knock Basis on the hardware score; the device itself is actually quite nice, from build quality to resilience to battery life. Their web UI's not bad, too, but what I really need is an API to pull that data out and integrate it with everything else I'm logging, and it just doesn't seem like they give a damn about publishing something stable, nor as far as I can tell have they ever.
On the whole, I'm pretty equivocal. On the one hand, the Basis device is excellent, and while I can't speak to accuracy, it's quite precise. On the other, the software support isn't sufficient, and the organization doesn't give any indication of being motivated to fix that. I'm not sorry I spent $200 on a Basis band, but you might be; think it over carefully.
I was hoping the Melon would actually ship, but it looks non-wearable at night.
Beddit is kind of a pain because launching the app on my phone is a pain; it requires manually pairing each time.
I'd really like a network-connected, adaptive-scheduling clock next to my bed, with EEG input. Something which could wake me up early if traffic to work is bad, or let me sleep late if my flight is delayed. Ideally with a home version which does NOT use my cellphone, and a travel version which is compatible and uses my phone.
I'd be fine paying $500 for this. There is probably a market in the tens of thousands.
2. Taking orders
3. Easy capital
I get agitated watching these. I find myself saying "What does it actually do!?" throughout the whole thing. I could completely be missing the boat on this trend but things like this and the weird eyepatch that came up a while ago completely baffle me.
I found the video hard to listen to. The guy has a bedside tone going on, a bit sleazy in his efforts to endorse the product with smooth caring ambience!
At the Velocity conference this year, Etsy did an amazing talk on sleep and being oncall (I can't seem to find it on youtube?). They released an open source app that links their oncall system to a sleep device (jawbone or fitbit) at https://github.com/etsy/opsweekly. Also, they had a nice graph which described how they were woken up less over the year because of this system.
Having this metric as another layer behind primary error budgets (app downtime is inversely proportional to the number of times your devs get to deploy new features) is a nice way to keep your operations staff very happy.
I really want one of these (in general).
...in case your skin can't
if your room is too bright, sense will tell you
...in case your eyes don't
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lslk.sleep...
Not to enter the EMF debate, I wonder if being pinged all night long by all sort of waves is going to make my bedroom zen.
My pillow tends to be either outside my bed and/or occupied by my cat when I wake up. Would this device still work under those circumstances?
Huh, turns out they did. https://twitter.com/jamesproud/status/491986164937535488
I am interested in this device but not Kickstarter backing interested. More like 3rd-gen price-drop interested.
The closest thing I know of is the OpenBCI.com project (Brain-Computer Interface) which is entirely an EEG project.