Louise bought me this crazy Sleeptracker watch that I had been looking at as an anniversary present. It monitors your sleep cycles and wakes you when you’re sleeping most lightly within specified a window.

The technology seems to be quite simple, it uses an accelrometer to sense motion. You move when you are sleeping only lightly. The watch tracks periods of motion through the night and lets you analyse the data the next morning. The average length of a period of sleep is 30 minutes, though this is strongly skewed, it’s more like 90 minutes at the start of the night.

You set the time you have to be up by, 9:30 in my case (int self employment great) and set a window length, 30 minutes for me. The watch will monitor your sleep cycle for that 30 minutes, 9:00 to 9:30, and if you look like you’re quite awake, it beeps. Both mornings it’s beeped less than ten minutes into the window so something must be working.

The effect is that when the alarm goes off, you’re concious, you’re sort of expecting it and you just turn the thing off. My problem is that I’m lazy and I then fail to bother to get out of bed. But I’m certainly awake, I lie there awake for ten or twenty minutes. That’s a miracle for me, normally I drop back into sleep within seconds.

I only have a tiny amount of evidence - two mornings - so I’m avoiding making any conclusions yet, but it’s looking interesting. The real test is when I need to use it to get 3 or 6 hours sleep in a deadline situation. If I can avoid that pain at the back of the eyes feeling I will be firstly amazed and second very happy. I have a huge deadline next week and then I’m off to catch a flight at 4:00 on Friday, so I’ll report again on Thursday, hopefully with some conclusive data.