Sleep Like a Robot with this Android App!

Sleep Like a Robot with this Android App!

August 26th, 2011

AndroidCouple

Kara’s Starbucks App review got me thinking about the iPhone apps I envied. I first heard about the iPhone app “Sleep Cycle” about a year ago on the Lifehacker blog, and I’ve always been a fan of the power nap and sleep hacking. Eight hours of sleep seems like such a waste. Do you know how much gaming I could get done in that time?After I saw a post by a friend about the Sleep Cycle app, I took another look in the Android Market, and was happy to find “Sleep as an Droid“.

As you sleep your body moves between heavier and lighter periods of sleep. Being harshly awakened (like by an alarm clock) during the heaviest part of your sleep can make you feel groggy and can even have a negative impact on your productivity for the whole day. Apps like Sleep as an Droid track your sleep cycles by using the accelerometer in your phone to gage how much you are moving. The alarm then sounds when you are at the lightest period of sleep, closest to when you need to wake up. Waking up this way feels almost like waking up with out an alarm.

This app has some other nice features as well. You can track your sleep patterns and even record sounds, such as snoring, or talking in your sleep. There is even a “no-snore” feature which softly vibrates the phone when it picks up a noise level above a certain range. Within the app you can set music or white noise to fall asleep to. And if you are like me, and tend to hit “snooze” without waking all the way up, their is an option that forces a visual or mathematical CAPTCHA before you can turn off the alarm.

I’ve only used it one night so far, but it definitely worked! One of my favorite features is the ability to set a “go-to-sleep” reminder to make sure you get all the hours you need. This app does everything but make me coffee in the morning, so I guess I still need my boyfriend for that.

Features: sleep graph history, sleep debt stats, sharing (FaceBook, email), nature alarms (birds, sea, storm…) with gradual volume up, music volume down when asleep, captcha, sleep talk/snoring recording (2 weeks trial)

To use this app, your phone needs to be in the bed with you, so download it, and give sleeping with Android a try.