Zeo Personal Sleep Coach $199

With the Zeo, you wear a headband to bed each night that communicates wirelessly with an alarm clock base. The band determines your “optimal” wake period within a certain window of time. The data is stored on an SD card, which you must then upload manually to Zeo’s website after each night.

While it was nice to know the quality of my sleep and how often I woke, uploading the data each morning was cumbersome and I’d frequently forget to do it. The headband was very uncomfortable and would often slip off. After a few weeks, I had to return the unit since it was completely useless to me, but at least it came in handy for benchmarking other devices (yes, at one point I had no less than four devices attached to me during sleep).

Best use: Hard to find one, unfortunately.

BodyMedia Body Sync $249 plus $12.95 a month

This device is primarily a weight loss monitoring tool you wear 24 hours a day, seven days a week, taking it off only to recharge and shower. You wear this device near your tricep on your upper arm, and it’s about the size of a iPod nano. It monitors how much time you were in bed, but doesn’t take into account how restful that sleep was and doesn’t have an alarm function. Unlike other devices, you don’t have to set it. It’s always watching you and syncs via Bluetooth.

After wearing it during a work out, I was able to figure out the optimal time to exercise in the evening so that I’m not too “revved” up before bed. I’d monitor my metabolism in real-time and figure out how many hours it took for my body to go from calorie burning mode to relaxation mode. I also liked knowing how many calories I burned while sleeping.

This device isn’t cheap, and the monthly monitoring adds to the cost, but if you want to see how sleep (or lack thereof) impacts your weight loss goals, this is a great product.

Best Use: Sleep monitoring in conjunction with weight loss.

Lark $129/$189 w/ coaching

The Lark is a wristband you wear while sleeping. It comes with its own charging station that also serves as an iPhone stand, although you can also charge it using any mini USB cable.

The Lark monitors your sleep to analyze how many times you woke and how “restful” the sleep was. It gives you a rating such as fair, poor, OK and good. For an additional charge, you can pay for sleep coaching, which will use the results to suggest better sleep habits. The Lark is unique in that instead of initially waking you up with an alarm, it vibrates silently. This enables you to wake yourself without waking your sleep partner and the rest of the house. My spouse was quite pleased with this and so was the dog. If you don’t awake from the vibration, the iOS app will use a failsafe alarm sound to wake you “gently” with the sounds of birds tweeting.

During testing, I often found the vibration rather jarring, and sometimes more disturbing than the actual alarm. I felt like someone was shaking me awake as if there were some kind of emergency. Over time I got used to it and learned that vibration meant it was time to wake up, but still was caught off guard some mornings. Sleeping with the device on was no problem. It was quite comfortable and felt like I was wearing a watch.

The failsafe alarm sound wasn’t changeable and on occasion I didn’t always hear it. While the coaching was interesting, it was hardly worth the extra $60 in my opinion. The advice wasn’t personalized, but simply took aspects of my sleep and offered suggestions (even some contradictory ones).

The iOS app wants to be in the foreground at all times, which made it difficult to use music apps such as Ambiance. If another app presented a notification while sleeping, it was confusing to get the Lark app back to alarm mode. If you want to snooze the alarm, you can’t set a specific time but are given a menu of choices in five-minute intervals.

Best Uses: Waking up without disturbing the household, nominal sleep monitoring and suggestions.

Wakemate $59.99

Wakemate has had a long rocky road to market: constant delays, hardware defects in initial release and buggy iOS apps. Luckily, the device seems to have overcome its difficult beginning and is now stable and reliable.

The Wakemate is a small Bluetooth USB device wrapped in a fuzzy terry cloth band that you wear around your wrist to sleep. It doesn’t vibrate like the Lark, but simply records your sleep movements and then uploads them to your iOS device and the Internet when it’s time to wake up. The iPhone (or iPad) stays safe on your beside table.

Wakemate’s unique feature is that, similar to the Zeo, it claims to monitor your sleep patterns and wake you up at an optimal time in your sleep cycle. I didn’t experience any perceived benefits from this, but did notice that the Zeo and Wakemate woke me generally at the same time. Wakemate’s iOS app allows you to customize the ringer to a song or one of its selected melodies. The default alarm was quite pleasant and not the blaring klaxon of the typical alarm clock nor the too-gentle sound I experienced with the Lark. Since it wakes you at an “optimal” time, you can’t snooze the alarm. It forces you to get up plain and simple. Personally I liked that rigidity.

Sleep result numbers were nearly identical to that of the Zeo. The “sleep score” was within 10 percent, and I felt it accurately recorded my wake and sleep times. Even though I might be in bed more than I thought, I realized a lower sleep score meant a lack of quality in my sleep. The app gives you the ability to tag your sleep in order to analyze patterns such as what you ate or drank before bed or your stress levels. You can even post your results to Facebook and Twitter.

During my test period I was disappointed with all the device problems and the manufacturer was very slow to respond. Although there was a known defect in their product, they still required owners to pay the shipping back to manufacturer. One mistake can be safely ignored, but I did see a pattern of problems and sincerely hope they get their house in order because I really liked the product.

Of all the devices I used, this was the most economical. A one time investment of $60 covered the device and there were no subscription fees to continue using it. Of course, that could change and the device isn’t usable without the app.

Best Uses: Detailed analysis of sleep patterns.

What will I be sleeping with now on? The Wakemate now has a trusted position in my bedroom. The times I forgot to charge it, I truly missed the analysis. I do like the Lark for those times I have to wake up extra early and don’t want to disturb the house. Who says I have to sleep with just one?

Disclosure: Bodymate, Lark, and Wakemate provided samples and service for this review.

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Easy Wakeup is an advanced alarm clock, designed to gently nudge you from your slumber, helping you wake up alert and ready to tackle the day’s tasks.

For some of us, sleep is a real bane — an interruption to what would otherwise be the perfect non-stop working schedule. To others, settling in to the glorious dirge of dreaming is a true joy. Regardless, we’ve all got to wake up sometime and, aside from those truly gifted natural-risers, most of us rely on an alarm clock.

Easy Wakeup is pitched as a smart alarm clock for the iPhone. Alongside waking you at the optimal moment, based on your sleep cycle, it also incorporates custom alarm tones and sleep-related statistics.

The Science of Sleep

Free Terra, the team behind the app, claims that Easy Wakeup helps you rise refreshed, energized and alert. The core features of the app are based on their assertion that the phase of sleep in which a person wakes up, affects how they feel throughout the day.

The idea is that Easy Wakeup prompts you to wake up at the optimal moment, rather than one pre-determined specific time. The developers say that there’s a link between our sleep phases and our body movements. With this in mind, in order to determine when we should rise, Easy Wakeup monitors your movements as you sleep and then calculates the ideal moment to wake you.

Having swallowed all the pseudo-science, this seems like a reasonable enough assertion to a lay-sleeper like myself. In testing Easy Alarm, I wanted to determine whether the app would bring any additional benefit to me, beyond that of a traditional alarm clock.

Looking Sleepy

Seeing as many users will be interacting with the app when they go to bed, or when they rise from bed, I expected the app to feel comfortable and intuitive. Instead, perched on the edge of my futon, trying to configure Easy Wakeup for the first time, I found the app’s look and feel inconsistent and frustrating.

The Alarm Clocks screen is where, much like the iPhone’s Clock app, you’ll configure multiple alarms – useful for those with shifting sleep routines, or partners who rise at a separate time. The alarms incorporate a cavalcade of settings, from customizable melody, to snooze and wake up intervals.

The incorporation of shake to snooze is terrific. It’s a smart way of having a snoozing user interact with the device. However, being able to configure wake up intervals felt confusing — I just didn’t understand what palpable affect this would have on my sleeping and waking.

Of note also is the Statistics screen, a section of the app which collates data relating to your sleeping patterns, specifically your rest time. The data is then rendered as an ugly looking graph which can be e-mailed out to acquaintances showing an unnatural interest in your sleep patterns.

While it could be wonderful to have access to these kind of statistics, the information it’s recording seems to be useless. I’d love to know how much I rolled around on a given night, or if I mumbled in my sleep, or to be able to consistently rate the quality of a night’s sleep and compare this data over time. Unfortunately, Easy Wakeup’s statistics just aren’t that useful, imaginative or fun.

Sweet Dreams

Setting it up for a night’s sleep I discovered that Easy Wakeup certainly isn’t as easy as the name asserts. Once the alarm is activated, the app instructs you to turn on Airplane Mode, turn off Wi-Fi, set the iPhone brightness to a minimum, charge the battery and attach the iPhone to your hand.

A frustrating, overwhelming, and downright irritating list of instructions that pile on the stress when you’re attempting to settle in for a good night’s sleep. The app is left open while you’re sleeping, hence the brightness needs to be turned down and the battery charged. Frankly, leaving your iPhone on all night with an app open just isn’t going to work for the vast majority of users.

And then there’s the big deal-killer: attaching the iPhone to your hand so that the app can record your movements. Apart from this instruction being utterly odd, killing any enthusiasm I had left for the app, I was quite befuddled when attempting to determine how best my iPhone should be literally attached to my hand: would I use a belt, string, tape, glue, a staple-gun?

Summing Up

The bafflingly long list of instructions, apexing with the über-punchline of, “attach the iPhone to your hand,” utterly ruin this app. I don’t think it’s a realistic, comfortable, or natural proposition to expect users to actually hold or attach the iPhone to their hand while sleeping.

Not being a sleep specialist, dream doctor, or nocturnal nerd, I can’t vouch for Free Terra’s pseudo-scientific assertions when it comes to the theory behind this app. However, sleeping with the iPhone in hand just doesn’t sit (or lie) right with me.

Furthermore, the app is ugly, counter-intuitive, and the stats seem to be useless. For the record, after trying the app for a few nights, I found that my sleep routine was completely disrupted by having the iPhone attached. The stress of having it there caused me to wake up early anyway, thus negating the actual alarm clock functionality. In summary, you’ll sleep better if you avoid Easy Wakeup.

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I watch a lot of videos on various sites including Youtube, Google video, etc., and one of my main gripes with the sites is that video does not make your mac think it is busy so it constantly falls asleep while playing a single clip.

In comes the freeware application Caffeine.

Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.

Caffeine is one of my must have applications and can be downloaded here.

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