Two things I love are sleeping and data collection. Now, thanks to a new iPhone app, I can do both at once.
Sleep Cycle uses the accelerometer in the iPhone to record vibrations in your mattress caused by you moving in the night. In this way it acts as an actigraph, keeping a record of your body movement, which in this context reflects how deeply you are asleep.
Here is the data from my last night’s kip. As you can see I show a fairly typical pattern: sleeping deeper in the first half of the night, compared to the second half, and having alternating patterns of deep and light sleep (although I seem to cycle through the stages of sleep every hour, rather than the typically quoted every one and a half hours).
The app also has an alarm which promises to wake you up during a lighter stage of sleep, so saving you the unpleasant sensation of being woken by your alarm from deep sleep. I’ve yet to try this out but it sounds like a good thing, as long as avoiding the jarring sensation is worth forgoing the extra minutes shut-eye!
Link: to the Sleepcycle app