Tracking My Sleep

Like most people I don’t think it’s any fun to get up in the morning. When you wake up feeling refreshed, it’s not that hard, but I usually feel rather tired when my alarm clock goes off. I certainly would pay a lot to be able to wake up feeling refreshed a bit more often.

That’s what Lee Loree also thought, when he came up with the brilliant SleepTracker: The SleepTracker monitors your body and continuously looks for your best possible waking times. SleepTracker wakes you up at just the right moment - during a window of time that you set.

Sounds good to be true? Here’s the verdict from Gear Live:

This product really was a pleasant surprise. Most of the things we review at Gear Live are gadgets with interesting or fun gimmicks that make them must-haves or horrible failures. The thing about the SLEEPTRACKER is that it doesn’t provide anything “fun” or “cool” per se. Instead, they have developed a product that actually improves your quality of life. Waking up fully energized on a daily basis is just amazing. It is almost as if there is no lost time, and you just want to seize the day. The product did exactly what it said it would do, and because of that, it gets our highest honor. This one comes very highly recommended.

Wired Gadget Lab also liked the SleepTracker:

I am not a morning person. I hate alarm clocks, and my husband risks his life whenever he tries to wake me. This gizmo seemed like my savior. Just strap it on and it monitors my sleep cycle - via a sensor that measures my movements - and wakes me when I’m most likely to be alert (there are almost-awake moments when we transition in and out of REM-stage sleep). At the start of a two-week trial run, I entered my bedtime and the time period in which I’d like to get up. I was amazed at how well it worked. For 10 out of the 14 days, I felt refreshed when it beeped me awake. But I still needed an obnoxious alarm clock as a backup, because on the other four days I slept right through the Sleeptracker’s nags, which aren’t very loud. Still, mornings are much more pleasant now - for me and my husband.

So I decided to get one.

Ordering the SleepTracker wasn’t the easiest of operations. Ordering it from the US would probably cost me a fortune in P&P plus customs charges and there are currently no distributor in Norway. The distributor in Denmark, which is also covering Norway for some weird reason, hasn’t been able to get a web site up and running yet and the only web shop selling the product in Sweden and Finland didn’t send stuff to Norway.

That’s what I call a sticky situation1.

This is were Tomas comes to the rescue! He currently lives in Sweden and is actually coming to Oslo next week. Lucky for me. I’ve now ordered the SleepTracker to an address in Sweden, he’ll pick it up there and bring it with him to Norway. That way I won’t have to pay any import tax, customs charges or similar expenses. Unless some overly eager customs officer reads this and decides to stop him no matter what.

Of course, the SleepTracker will not help when it comes the motivation to get out of bed and go to work - unless it also secretly injects small dozes of Prozac into your waist while you sleep. But I guess waking up feeling refreshed will help a lot.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the gadget, if I’m lucky, Tomas will have it with him when he arrives on Wednesday. With a little luck, it’ll work, too.


  1. Another cartoon reference, partial credit to the first person who names the cartoon. ↩︎


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