Thursday, April 07, 2005

A Primary Sleeptracker Criticism

Yesterday morning's Sleeptracker wakeup was a bust as was this morning's wakeup.

The reason I believe to be part of Sleeptracker's largest flaw:

You have to arrange your sleeping environment, habits, and everything else around the watch, and even then it fails because certain noise-producing events are simply out of your control.

Yesterday morning, I had the alarm set for a 30 minute window 6:00-6:30. At roughly 6:15, one of our cats began scratching at the door because he was hungry. What's bad is that his scratching woke me up which then caused the chain reaction of setting off the Sleeptracker alarm. Talk about annoying! --not only was I awoken during what was NOT an 'almost awake' moment, but I was kept awake for 20 additional seconds by the Sleeptracker alarm, which you cannot shutoff once it begins sounding. AAAhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (CORRECTION: I've since found out that you can turn off the alarm by holding down the GLO button.)

So last night, I made doubly sure that the cats' food and water was taken care of before going to sleep. HOWEVER, I made the stupid mistake of not coordinating my alarm time with my wife's alarm time. Her cell phone alarm went off at 6:13 and woke me up. Again, not only is her alarm loud and obnoxious, but by waking me up it caused the Sleeptracker alarm to go off after about 10 seconds (latency). That equated to another (10 sec latency + 20 sec alarm) 30 seconds of fun wakeup alarm noise...

After the Sleeptracker alarm went off, I tried going back to sleep, even though I was livid mad (grouchy) because of the chain alarm reaction, and the fact that it failed due to dumb stuff two days in a row. Of course, as soon as 6:30 rolled around, the alarm went off once again.......no gentle wakeup this morning either.

What I have concluded from the past two mornings is that if you have any of the following...

  • an infant
  • a wife/husband with a regular alarm
  • pets that make noise (scratching doors, howling, and/or meowing)
  • neighbors that make noise occasionally
....you had better do your best to minimize the possiblity that they will wake you up, ESPECIALLY during your alarm window. That window is the pseudo-sacred time when Sleeptracker has to do ITS magic. If you are woken up by extraneous noise, you will get a double dose of aggravating noise.

Going Forward
I spoke with my wife this morning about aligning our alarms so that they don't conflict, and I plan to try taping foil to the outside of our bedroom door to deter the cats from scratching (if anyone has other ideas for detering cat scratching on the door, let me know--and yes, we do have a dedicated scratching post for them).

Another Criticism
One other flaw with Sleeptracker that I discovered yesterday and today is that besides having no 'snooze' function, if you change the alarm time after events like mine, you lose all of your 'almost awake' data from that night. If you want to record your data and you want to move your alarm time later (manual 'snooze'), you need to wake up fully, record the data, set your new alarm time, and then go back to sleep.... Of course, by the time you do all that, you'll be too awake to get much more sleep. So I apologize, but when I changed my alarm time from 6:30 to 7:30 yesterday and today, I lost all of my statistical data to record/report....that just makes me mad. Oh well....you can't expect it to be perfect I suppose....I'll try it again tonight after doing my best to eliminate any possible extraneous sleep interruptions.

Till next time....


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, some excellent (albeit slightly disappointing) insights. Your sleeping environment sounds like a challenging one, but not more than for a lot of people I suppose. That was a good point about the novelty of the watch factoring in to how awake you feel, the watch definitely needs more than a few nights before it can be judged for that reason.

Anonymous said...

You can also try putting up double sided tape where the cat scratches. They hate that.

Anonymous said...

you can turn off the alarm...press and hold the GLO (top left) button till it does.