WakeMate is an upcoming accessory for the iPhone that aims to improve your quality of sleep by waking you up at the precise right moment. Supposedly, everyone has an optimal waking moment that occurs every 20 minutes or so after a good night’s sleep. The WakeMate is a small bluetooth band you wear around your wrist and contains accelerometers that track your movement during sleep. The monitoring of such sleep movement is known as actigraphy. Actigraphy in the past has been used as a cost-effective way to assess sleep disorders.
The WakeMate wristband will work in conjunction with an upcoming iPhone app that will allow you to set the alarm for a 20-minute period and wake you at your lightest stage of sleep within that interval. The wristband triggers the alarm on your iPhone, waking you up. This means it gets you up at the least traumatic time, and hopefully stops you from feeling foul all morning.
Not only that, but it tracks and graphs your sleep cycles, so you can analyze your rest patterns, and make sure you’re sleeping enough. It’s available for preorder, with an overall sticker price of $50. Apparently, it can also work with any bluetooth enabled phone, so even if you don’t have an iPhone you could find some use for it.
