I’m always looking for better ways to wake up, but other than the jarring loud alarm that wakes me up every morning, I haven’t found a decent solution to my problem. This app might do the trick.
The Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock app is available for iPhone, and it monitors your movement during sleep using the iPhone’s accelerometer. Then, it finds the optimal time to wake you up during a 30 minute window that ends right at the time that you set your alarm.
The goal of this is to wake you at the optimal time to minimize the sleep inertia caused from jarring yourself awake at the wrong point in your sleep cycle. This is because people move differently during the phases of their sleep. During the lightest sleep phase, you move the most and that’s when Sleep Cycle wakes you up.
This seems like a definite improvement over some of the other alarm apps and solutions I’ve come across. The fact that it monitors your sleep using the iPhone itself is also pretty cool. You can get Sleep Cycle for $0.99 at iTunes.