Wakemate (YC S09) helps you kiss groggy mornings goodbye
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's a lot like Glastonbury ticketing. Deposits in autumn, full payment in January. This is extra profitable because in January many people are short on cash post-christmas and either can not or choose not to pay the full amount. You get to keep the non-refundable deposit and then sell the ticket/product again to another person.
As an aside, any idea on how hackable the Wakemate is? Presumably other devices could talk to it over bluetooth, eg a homemade arduino based alarm clock. Will the bluetooth protocol and data format used be published?
as evidenced by this thread :)
It took me about 15 seconds from the initial onload to typing my PayPal password, and I'm normally just seething with deliberative-yuppie-purchasing-angst. My normal minimum conversion time is at least an hour of research and a week of wall-clock time.
If you can hack my purchasing process so effectively, I'm pretty confident that you'll do well by my sleep cycle. Bravo!
I bet my graphs are going to be REALLY interesting.
I didn't get to use one of the new, super sleek, production quality ones. I used an early prototype that slipped inside a wrist band (like tennis players wear). It was actually still pretty comfortable to sleep with - I didnt even feel it after the first night.
It definitely woke me up at the optimal time in my sleep cycle. The alarm app was a really simple web app, and the bluetooth was simple. It was cool to see my sleep analyzed with all our different metrics and quality rated. The sleep analytics software was pretty simple, but definitely did the trick.
I don't have trouble getting to sleep if I put in a full day of productive work topped off with exercise. Is this product only for people with sleep problems?
The problem is when I go to bed really late and/or need to wake up earlier than I would naturally. As it turns out, I am more affected by when I wake up in my sleep cycle than I am by how long I sleep. If I need to wake up at 7:30am for a call with east coast people, the wakemate would wake me up at "around" 7:30 (you can set a hard stop), during the point in my sleep cycle in which I am most amenable to being woken up. It's the difference between feeling like shit, and feeling like I woke up naturally.
I was fortunate enough to know these guys while they were building the wakemate prototypes, and even luckier to have had the opportunity to sleep with one
Joking aside, if this actually works and you value your time it should pay for itself more or less straight away. I'll be watching closely.
edit on re-reading it looks like the parent noticed that too...oh well.
Not every phone has bluetooth and can run third-party apps, especially if you bought a cheap non-branded phone. Also, not every would know it's necessary for a device like this.
Even better, why not allow us to download the app now?
So do I have to pay extra charges for that? How much data is being sent? Can I view stats on my phone? Can I tether my phone to my computer to look at stats?
I can't find any of these answers on their site. Which is frustrating, because this almost sounds like something that would interest me.
I've heard complaints that it doesn't accurately monitor your sleep cycles because it uses an accelerometer which obviously doesn't work if you don't move enough.
There is a product called Zeo that supposedly detects your brainwaves but then people complain about having to wear a strap on your head. http://www.myzeo.com/
Anyone want to share their experience with these sleep aids?
As far as the Zeo goes, it is a great product. Very interesting future (there are some obvious 'this is a first release' flaws) but overall, it rocks. Knowing to the minute how much you slept with REM and deep sleep markers is quite interesting and fun.
I've got an extra in Boulder if anyone wants to try it out.
What a huge difference in the morning! I used to be the kind of person that needed a 20 min hot shower to properly wake up. Now I wake up mostly alert and almost never groggy.
I noticed the change most this week since I flew to Philly for Thanksgiving with family and don't have my Zeo. The last few mornings without it have been hit or miss.
The pretty graphs and statistics were interesting for the first couple weeks, especially to compare how alcohol and caffeine affect my sleep, but the novelty wears off. The smart wakeup is by far the best feature and if the Wakemate can do a similar job, it'll be a cheaper solution that I can take on the road.
That's interesting, because I suspect I may be one of those. Any idea how many people have that problem and if I can determine upfront whether this product will work for me?
The article asks why they did not put the alarm in the watch - the sleeptracker chooses that exact strategy and it did not work well for either of us. One, the alarm was not that loud (probably cannot be that loud in such a design). Two, if you had your wrist under your pillow it was inaudible. And three, the alarm is trivially accessible and easy to turn off - not a good thing for an inventive and persistent snooze buttoner like myself.
The product was a huge disappointment to the both of us. The price point and design for this product are encouraging - I will probably try it out.
One tip I would do if I were them were to contact all those huge sleep lab companies and try to get them interested. Insurance covered prescribed factory sleep labs drive the industry.
How is wrist movement co-related to sleep patterns ? Is there any scientific study / data out there that explain the co-relation ?
Co-relation of pulse rhythm is more obvious - cant say the same about wrist movement.
Anyone care to explain ?
Congratulations, excellent idea and a very nicely priced implementation.
I sincerely hope you'll sell these by the containerload.
If actigraphy is an established sleep-study technique, then you have to wonder why there aren't more players.
edit: and had i opened my eyes i would have seen the free shipping worldwide!
Now I just can't wait to get it!
Sometimes I am up at the first gong and sometimes it takes several. Now, hooking up my bowl gong to the wakemate could make for a great combination.
I'm guessing polyphasic sleepers can use this, but no idea if they provide support specifically for polyphasic sleepers. Just curious, are you a polyphasic sleeper?
"WakeMate is launching with support for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, and a standard Java app for non-smart phones"
I'd try it myself, but for now my commute prevents me from being able to do it.
pchristensen did it a year or two ago, and it was really interesting to read about.
I loved it but my life didn't accommodate it. It was much easier on work days because I could sleep both ways on the train, one nap in the middle of the day, and then make it through family duties at night before I needed another nap. My wife didn't enjoy the scheduling difficulties on the weekend and it's not something you can switch on and off on short notice (takes about 5-7 days the first time and 2-3 days to start back up). There's a couch at my new job and I'm considering starting up again.
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
The science has been done. The tests are clear. Polyphasic sleepers suffer performance losses in mental tasks compared to normal sleepers. In particular, it significantly impairs long-term memory coding.
Charlatans like Steve Pavlina always refused to do even basic scientific testing. His results simply can't be trusted, especially since he has a massive vested interest in it being effective.
If there is some reason you need to sleep less than 3 hours per day, then polyphasic is the best way to do that. However you will always have reduced performance compared to those who get a full 7 hour sleep.
If you want a sleep schedule optimized for creative/intellectual performance, free-running sleep is the best available. Piotr Wozniak has plenty of science of his website showing that this is the case.
I'm afraid I don't see any citations in that article for studies done specifically on polyphasic sleep. I see citations for the natural length of the human day (24.2 hours), sleep deprivation effects, maximum waking time for humans, etc. But nothing but unbacked, though strongly held, assertions about polyphasic sleep. I may have missed it, but every time the article goes into discussion of polyphasic, it seems to talk around the issue when providing citations, and explicitly to the issue when it is clearly the authors opinion. It has the feel of a religious tract, rather than a scientifically sound article.
I'm not saying the author is wrong. I've never had much luck with polyphasic sleep, as I mentioned above, and I'm certainly not going to argue that it's a great idea without having had any success with it myself or at least having seen good science on the matter. But, if this is the best "science" there is to offer suggesting it does not work, then I don't think I'm convinced.
That said, I'm leaning towards one of the "core sleep plus naps" variants this time around rather than the 6x20 minute routine. I do enjoy sleeping. At least, I seem to, since I do it a lot, and frequently roll over and drift back to sleep in the morning. I also love a couple of cups of jasmine green tea in the morning with breakfast...it's a one to two hour ritual that makes me happy. And a polyphasic schedule would throw all of that for a loop...though I might try kicking caffeine for a while, too. I won't have an Asian market nearby from which to buy my Yamamoto tea, so I probably won't want to drink tea, anyway.
I don't read Pavlina and am unfamiliar with his arguments regarding sleep, so I don't know anything about his results.
At the same time, he found that polyphasic sleep results in poorer performance compared to normal sleepers. And this was considered non-noteworthy, since obviously 2 hours of sleep is worse than 8. You can find his articles on Google Scholar.
Steve Pavlina is the only person I know of who has claimed to be polyphasic for an extended period of time and claimed that there is no performance decrease. Unfortunately, Steve refused to do any scientific testing and relied entirely on his own subjective judgment. He gave it up after 6 months anyway, but still maintains it is effective.
Steve's Pavlina's experience however exactly fits in with the best scientific understanding of sleep (which Wozniak perfectly elucidates). Steve Pavlina was never able to maintain the schedule without an alarm clock, which indicates that his body did not adapt and was not co-operating or behaving in a "natural" way.
The theory that Steve was only getting REM is shot down by his own journals which indicate that he was getting both Delta and REM. My own experience with polyphasic also indicates that while the proportion of REM may increase, you still get delta sleep. I was fully (and rigidly) polyphasic for some weeks but never stopped having delta sleep. I also consistently showed decreased performance that could only be overcome by surges of adrenaline and autonomic excitation in general - which is easily caused when a loud alarm clock wakes you up when your body desperately desires sleep. You are tricking your body into a state of permanent fight or flight.
Anyway the studies were done in the 80s that directly measured performance. But in the modern day extensive studies have been done on sleep and everything we know about sleep now shoots down all the theorizing that the polyphasics use to justify their crazy. The idea that delta wave sleep is useless has been utterly rejected because it has been shown that delta wave sleep contributes to long-term memory encoding. If you cut down on delta wave, you cut down on long-term memory. If you cut down on sleep in general, you cut down on cognitive abilities in general.
This trade off may be worth it for some people, but they should be aware that it is a trade off. Magical thinking like that displayed by Steve Pavlina does not magically make you immune from the negative side effects of sleep deprivation. You get over the drowsiness with sheer strength of will and adrenaline, but the fogginess doesn't go away. (Steve considered the fogginess to be a benefit. But remember this is a guy who believes ghosts tell him how to win at blackjack.)
You're right, however, that there is a cult-like feeling around polyphasic sleep discussion, and I view that sort of thing with extreme skepticism...but I'm surprised to find it happening on both sides. The "debunkers" are just as guilty of making unbacked claims, and poorly citing their opinions.
Every time I've seen a straight up assertion about how long one should sleep, whether napping can reduce the total number of hours needed, etc. I'm unable to find a study that directly backs the assertion. I guess such studies must exist, but no one is linking to them. Even Wikipedia is surprisingly lacking in citations of directly relevant scientific research on the matter.
References I found enlightening about the actual practice of it (in favor of it) are the book Ubersleep:
http://www.lulu.com/content/2649551
and Hacker News threads like this one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=673726
I've read enough anecdotal evidence to be convinced that when it polyphasic sleep works, it works -- that after a potentially rough (and potentially impossible, depending on the person) period of adaptation, the practitioner is not significantly impaired in day-to-day functioning. Skeptics' arguments usually boil down to "it's unnatural", "you can't get something for nothing", or "it didn't work for me".
In terms of needing to set an alarm, I don't know if the body can learn a polyphasic schedule or not; even if it can, the reasons busy monophasic people use alarms to regulate their sleep would apply all the more so to polyphasic sleepers, and I get the sense polyphasic sleep is a sort of "unstable equilibrium"; and if the body can't learn it, that still doesn't mean it's unnatural.
Science could come along and discover a long-term deleterious effect of getting so little sleep, in which case I'd be all ears, but it seems doubtful. I hope the science catches up, though, and we figure out what the deal is with sleep, so we don't have to argue quite so irrationally. There's a lot of interesting recent work on whether being unconscious for eight hours is mostly a behavioral adaptation rather than a biological necessity.
My general philosophy is "if it works, do it", and it definitely works in some instances. Reducing total time spent sleeping per day isn't like smoking cigarettes, it isn't going to slowly poison you. Lots of people get very poor sleep and are definitely impaired during the day, more so than a skilled polyphasic sleeper would report, and they aren't doing long-term damage.
If reducing delta wave sleep by 10% significantly decreases performance on memory and reasoning tests, why should reducing delta sleep by 90% fail to decrease performance?
Lots of studies are done on sleep, but they are never as extreme as polyphasic because it would be considered unethical to perform those studies. Those few insane people like me who actually did go polyphasic don't get scientifically tested.
It did work for me but I recognized that my performance had decreased because at the time I was in memorization-oriented schooling and using Anki to manage my memorization tasks. With the help of Anki, I could see quite clearly that my memorization abilities had decreased.
It was also never a natural state. It was a constant state of heightened autonomic response - fight or flight. Especially at nighttime, my body was surging with corticosteroids. This stress response is what provides the capability to stay awake so long, but it comes at the price of high-level thinking and memorization.
Typically in nature, humans will adopt polyphasic sleep in times of war and other extremely stressful situations. This is adaptive because their life is threatened. This is not the case for the modern knowledge worker.
There is tons of science on sleep. The polyphasic people base their theory on the outdated and discredited idea that we only need REM sleep. This has been categorically disproven by modern sleep researchers. Slow wave sleep provides many benefits, the most clear being improved memory but also better performance on other cognitive tasks.
See my reply here as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963502
Preordered, anyway. I've always wanted to try this but the price point of similar gadgets have been over the "cool thing to try" level (>2-300 bucks).
It must be extremely motivating to see all of these $5 payments come into your account, too :)
In lighter stages of sleep this doesn't happen and you do move around.
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/stresseraser_and_sleeptra...
First off, I love this product. But before I click purchase, I want to know: how good of a proxy is the wrist accelerometer for brain wave activity?
Someone else asked this already but I didn't see a response. Ideally, I would love to know what the quantitative results were from your testing. For instance, if sleepers rate their grogginess after waking up every day, what kind of an improvement do you see in those ratings? What is the distribution like? Are there a certain percentage of people who don't respond to the Wakemate because for some personal reason their wrist movements don't correlate with brain wave activity?
I think this data would help sell a lot more of these since that's definitely what made me pause - and I was very ready to purchase.
Thanks!
Questions? Comments? Send an email to contact@wakemate.com, or call us at 1-800-951-4761
In terms of the iPhone app, how do they trigger anything without having to keep your iPhone on and in their app the whole time? Other than that I am sold.
On a side note, this page is terribly hard on the eyes. http://www.wakemate.com/about/ I don't know if it's just me or not, but I think they need some more spacing between the letters??
But yeah, who puts -1px letter spacing on their body copy? Ouch. Painful.
However, so far I've had trouble triggering the song at the right time. Perhaps this app will be configurable enough to play an MP3 when I'm in REM?
One of these events took the form of a dream that I had written the most powerful, moving song ever, one that could forcibly move people to tears due to sheer awesomeness. Bear in mind I'm not talking about an abstract assessment, but a deep belief that this was awesome. For once, I managed to actually drag the song back up to the waking world, whereupon I discovered that my brilliant song was, in two-second-long quarter notes, the following incredible melody line: C, C, D, C, repeat.
(The full moon seems like a good one to me; I get a lot of circles in my dreams, only due to my science-fiction viewing proclivities, they tend to turn into Stargates.)
Using a song as a trigger for lucid dreaming seems like a reasonable enough way to send myself a signal, though I honestly don't have much to back it up.
... so you can listen to REM while in REM?
Also, I presume the analytics can be used without the alarm?
I confirmed with them that worldwide includes China too (so many companies do not ship there that I've become wary) so will be getting one :-)
You could load the analytics app without it, but you'd need some device with bluetooth to trigger the alarm. Someone will inevitably release desktop apps to interface it, especially since all Macs ship with bluetooth and tiny USB dongles for your PC cost about a dollar.
I'd be quite happy sleeping like this, but it effects my personal life.
This sounds like it was made for me!
*e: Just to be sure before I pre-order. Any bluetooth enabled phone that has access to the internet will work, correct?
The techcrunch post has an error, by the way. It says you get $5 off when you pre-order.
My wife and I discussed something similar using EEG measurements but couldn't find a practical way to apply the electrodes in a consumer-grade product. This is a good example of solving that problem obliquely.
Pre-ordered.
On a different note, if this is bluetooth, whats preventing it from working with a computer etc. Why only phone??
I need something for the mornings after I don't follow all the rules ;)
Congratulations to the Wakemate team! I think you've helped me with my Christmas shopping.
Why doesn't the device just use wifi to call any number so that I could have it call my cell and wake me up?
ive always had trouble with sleep, and especially functioning in the mornings
In any case, cool gadget.
Especially when you consider that wakemate is doing something a little bit more complicated than just throwing a bunch of common components together?