Your relationship with sleep changes when you become a parent. For a start you realise how little sleep you can survive on. The idea of an unbroken night's rest becomes a distant memory as you are woken every few hours to feed/change/settle your newborn.
Our kids are old enough now to sleep through most nights. But still, my other half hankers for that perfect night's sleep. Always keen to use technology to ease the pressures of modern life, I was interested to read about a new iPhone app that claimed it could help us sleep better.
Sleep Cycle uses the iPhone's accelerometers to measure your movement while you are sleeping and calculate your sleep pattern. At the end of the night you have a graph with highs and lows representing light and deep sleep.
But that's not all. The app is designed to make use of this information to wake you up when you are in a light sleep moment. This, the developers claim, is the best way to wake up and feel refreshed. The app aims to trigger the alarm when you are in a light sleep moment, as near as it can to the wakeup time you set.
I was a little sceptical at first, but I've been surprised by the results. Once I had sorted out a charging cable for the phone in the bedroom (you need it plugged in through the night), followed the simple calibration instructions it did its job very well.
Into my third night now and expectations are high to wake bright and refreshed. My next plan is to rig it up for my youngest who still has daytime sleeps -- and often wakes up grumpy. Perhaps it could help him get the most out of his naps as well. I wonder what technology you use to make these new baby years a little easier?
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