About a week ago I downloaded this alarm clock app for my iPhone called Sleep Cycle Alarm. I was skeptical at first. How different could it be than the alarm that's already on my iPhone? It turns out that it's pretty darn good.

What it does is use the accelerometer in the iphone to sense your movement while you sleep. The less you move the deeper the sleep you're getting and the more you move the closer you are to waking. It keeps track of your sleep in a graph.

The best part is the alarm clock part. You set it for a certain time and in a 30 minute window before your alarm time it will wake you when it senses that you are close to waking. I didn't think much of it till I woke up a couple of mornings and noticed that I felt more refreshed and didn't feel the need for some sort of caffeinated stimulate to get me going. If it doesn't sense you waking in that window it wakes you at your specific time. It does it with a choice of a few melodic tunes that come on gradually instead of all at once which makes a big difference.

Here is the statistics from my best night's sleep.

Sleep statistics for 16 - 17 Aug (Tue).

Went to bed / woke up: 10:17 PM / 7:00 AM
Total time: 8h 42m

Analysis made by Sleep Cycle.

My sleep graph for the entire night: