8 ms·

Sense – Wake up when it's right for you

104 points by clayallsopp 12y ago

njharman 12y ago
The body works amazingly well when taken care of and listened too. Really. Instead of hyper tracking every aspect of your life [and making assumptions based on that data] Just exercise, eat well, no caffeine, minimal sugar/food after dark, get 10+min of sun around noon, go to sleep when tired. All of which is almost impossible for 90% of people who are forced into regimented, high stress, excessive work lives.
- colmvp 12y ago
  I love the taste of coffee and tea, both of which have caffeine. Curious, why 10+ minutes of sun at noon?
  - apierre 12y ago
    Vitamin D I would guess
  - arjunnarayan 12y ago
    I've found Trader Joe's "smooth and mello" decaf blend to be the only decaf blend that tastes like actual coffee. I can recommend it. I now drink about 2-4 cups of that stuff (french press brewed, and in the summer, cold-brewed overnight for iced coffee) and an espresso a day (the espresso machine at school has a caffeinated blend and I love espresso too much to stay away from it). This limits my caffeinated total to less than two cups a day (since decaf still has some non-negligible amount of caffeine).
  - njharman 12y ago
    Body needs to know when to sleep. With all our artificial light it's easy to skew ones Circadian Rhythm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_clock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_clock
- arjunnarayan 12y ago
  I'd add in that you should avoid computer screens (or use some software like f.lux on the maximum dark setting) after the sun goes down. I'd also recommend watching your alcohol consumption in the evening as that significantly disrupts your sleep cycle.
  - lpsz 12y ago
    No kidding -- I routinely code late into the night. Each time, I can't fall asleep if I didn't have f.lux on a fairly "yellow" setting. I (a) wish that something like that was built into iOS and (b) feel bad for people who don't know f.lux exists (or RedShift, for Linux folks.)
    - nikunjk 12y ago
      f.lux is the only reason I have a jailbroken iPhone. I can no longer stare into other people's phones at night without f.lux
- mbillie1 12y ago
  This is, sadly, advice which gets ignored by an overwhelming number of people in our industry. I know so many otherwise smart folks who buy a FitBit and track their caloric intake only to then drive (not go outside and walk) 2 blocks to get lunch at McDonalds or someplace similar. You don't need a product/app to live a healthy lifestyle... most likely if you are trying to solve a health/lifestyle problem by purchasing something, that is just symptomatic of yet another unhealthy aspect of your lifestyle.
  - Brakenshire 12y ago
    > You don't need a product/app to live a healthy lifestyle You don't if you live within constraints which are healthy. Many people do not, because of their job, or because of the way their physical environment is set up - for instance, you may stand in a shop for 8 hours a day, and develop problems with your legs. The sensible thing to do is not to stand for 8 hours a day, but the reason why you may have done that before is because that is the expected, default behaviour. To change that so you are moving around enough not to cause damage requires deliberate and ongoing intervention, and something that tracks movement can certainly help with that. Likewise if you develop health problems from sitting for 8 hours a day.
  - aaronem 12y ago
    > most likely if you are trying to solve a health/lifestyle problem by purchasing something, that is just symptomatic of yet another unhealthy aspect of your lifestyle Tell that to the thirty pounds I've lost, over the last couple months, by dint of using a Basis band to track calories out, and logging what I eat to do the same for calories in.
    - gordjw 12y ago
      Could you have done it without the band though?
      - aaronem 12y ago
        Not and have any idea how close I am to my target deficit; I'd either err low and fail to lose the weight, or err high and badly endanger my health via malnutrition. With the band, I know exactly where I'm coming in on a daily basis, and I can, for example, plot calorie deficit over delta-weight and see where I should be aiming for best effect. In general, I'm surprised to see such a Luddite attitude espoused on HN. What kind of engineer doesn't see the value in collecting the necessary data to characterize a problem or a process accurately? That's Step One.
- bnejad 12y ago
  Why no sugar/food after dark? Any links?
  - wise_young_man 12y ago
    Food provides energy and when it isn't burned turns into fat.
    - bnejad 12y ago
      Looks like the juries out and many evidence still points to the total amount of calories in/out over the day is the only defining factor. http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-truth-myth-eating-night-causes-weight-gain http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-truth-myth-eating-ni...
  - njharman 12y ago
    Sugar gives you energy, makes you hyper. Energy and hyper not conductive to sleep. nightime is sleeptime. As least that is what your body expects when not amped on caffeine, sugar and other stimulants.
- austinjp 12y ago
  While I agree with the sentiment here, the actual mechanics just don't hold true for plenty of people. Certainly the 80/20 rule probably applies: your suggestions will fix a great many issues for many people, and it's definitely worth reminding most people to make several of the changes you suggest -- particularly exercise and sleep. But if the recipe was really that simple for all people, more of us would experience more success. Humans are complex. Not mechanistically complex, stochastically. We're chaotic. One set of inputs may produce different outputs, and reverse-engineering the reasons for those differences may be "hard" or impossible. Apps and tracking devices can help reveal small areas where a fractional improvement in control or quality can have very large beneficial effects. Lifestyles and other highly personal factors mean that the application of a simple single formula will be met with varying success. And anyway, you have to measure the outcomes to understand how successful the intervention has been. I'd also point out that just because you feel well, it doesn't mean that your lifestyle or body (or mind) are healthy. Some attempt at objective data is useful to determine if you're really as healthy as you think you are. Sure, you may feel great if you get regular sleep every night. But did you know your sleep apnea puts you at increased risk of cardiovascular disease? Edit: probably a better example... You may feel perfectly fine sitting down for several hours per day. But you're at increased risk of a whole range of diseases. A timer set to beep evey 20 minutes to remind you to get up and move may actually add years to your life. This isn't a defence of lifestyle or health/fitness apps and so on, just a recognition that they work for some people, and for some circumstances. Or so it appears. This is the start of a vast, poorly coordinated longitudinal experiment. We'll be poring over the data for years yet.
dmix 12y ago
Looks very similar to http://www.withings.com/us/withings-aura.html http://www.withings.com/us/withings-aura.html I really want one of these (in general).
- pat2man 12y ago
  Yeah I don't think I would shell out for a Kickstarter that may never ship when there is a pretty comparable product already on the market.
  - IanCal 12y ago
    Well the withings one isn't actually out yet, and it doesn't say how much it is.
philbarr 12y ago
What affects my sleep isn't me setting my alarm for the wrong time, it's my 13 week old baby. I'm sure I've seen a few things like this in the past. I wonder if they could adopt it for use as a baby monitor? We do currently have a sleep monitor but that just sets off an alarm if she hasn't moved in 20 seconds (or I pick her up and forget to turn the damn thing off, grrrr). I could see this being a really useful baby monitor that: - sets off an alarm if no movement in 20 seconds (important one this, obviously) - lets you know if your baby is drifting off into sleep or is basically just messing about and still wide awake. Like, are you going to be able to go to bed now or should you just make a brew? - a recording of and detailed description of sleep patterns during the night, so you've got an idea of how to organise your nights; like maybe you could work out when she's more likely to wake up at? - a history and some kind of comparison chart, because with babies it changes all the time, so you might be able to predict and adapt in advance. - an advance warning of when she's coming out of sleep. Babies go from slightly peckish to screaming their head off hungry in a couple of minutes, and it takes 5 minutes to warm a bottle. Having a "she's gonna need feeding soon alarm" would be really handy.
- gingerlime 12y ago
  I know this thing is personal/individual, and different books give difference advice, but we just had our baby boy sleep with us, until he was about 8 months old (quite long, I know, and our bed is pretty small). You really learn a lot about his patterns, movements, and you just feel him around. No need for monitors, setting things on/off, and no. We didn't suffocate him or squashed him. It was very natural to us (and him). I can wholeheartedly recommend it to new parents, and I can honestly say I miss him around now that he sleeps in his own bed just next to ours.
  - philbarr 12y ago
    Yeah I think that would have been a nice thing to do, but there's no way we could after all the scare stories we were told.
    - zephjc 12y ago
mztan 12y ago
I wonder how applicable these kinds of devices are to babies. Are baby monitors already capable of similar types of sleep tracking?
- apierre 12y ago
  We have the Withings baby monitor with noise and movement tracking.
DougWebb 12y ago
So, a WiFi-attached device sitting in my bedroom with a high-sensitivity microphone, a proximity detector, and unknown software? I think I'll pass, even though the product seems cool and useful otherwise. Sure, I've got my cellphone in my bedroom at night and it's got the mic, network connection, and unknown software. But I figure there's a much better chance of someone discovering that Google or Sprint has installed a backdoor into my phone's OS or hardware that's sending recordings illicitly than there is of someone discovering the same thing about a niche product. If the software was open (such that I could compile and install it myself if I wanted to), and the collected data was open and available to me too, I'd be a lot more inclined to buy this. Those changes would also create the possibility of an add-on developer community that could be constantly providing new software capabilities to the device, which makes it even more compelling as a product. For example, philbarr is asking about a bunch of baby monitor features; those could all be added with software changes, I'd bet.
- Brakenshire 12y ago
  The first thing I look for with these products is whether there is an option for the data to stay local, or whether it is always sent directly to the cloud. I'm just not comfortable with that class of data being sent off site. This is one reason why I'm confused by the internet of things, is the model really going to be that we have pervasive black boxes sending continuous data feeds to god knows where?
- xpose2000 12y ago
  They offer an API. It states so in their kickstarter campaign. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hello/sense-know-more-sleep-better https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hello/sense-know-more-s...
  - epi16 12y ago
    That's very different than being able to examine the source code and the data to see where everything is going. Also, though I'm not a rabid proponent of FOSS software, in this case, I would prefer to have many eyes on this code, since the authors are unknown (to me) and the data is sensitive.
fintler 12y ago
This is an idea that I hope becomes more widespread for operations folks -- optimizing what alerts to prioritize fixing based on the number that result in wakeup calls. At the Velocity conference this year, Etsy did an amazing talk on sleep and being oncall (I can't seem to find it on youtube?). They released an open source app that links their oncall system to a sleep device (jawbone or fitbit) at https://github.com/etsy/opsweekly https://github.com/etsy/opsweekly. Also, they had a nice graph which described how they were woken up less over the year because of this system. Having this metric as another layer behind primary error budgets (app downtime is inversely proportional to the number of times your devs get to deploy new features) is a nice way to keep your operations staff very happy.
joevandyk 12y ago
How does this work with cats walking on my pillow at three am? Does that mess up the sensors?
- josefresco 12y ago
  Also, how does it handle the 1-3 times I get up to pee, let the dogs out to pee, or grab a drink?
system_32 12y ago
Why do they need a kickstarter? They have the money for an entire team and are hiring more.
- msutherl 12y ago
  1. Advertising 2. Taking orders 3. Easy capital
- macNchz 12y ago
  That was my first thought. Crunchbase shows they raised $10.5m at the end of January(1). Now they need $100k of crowdfunding to build this thing? Disingenuous at best. [1]http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hello-inc http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hello-inc
  - ernopp 12y ago
    the kickstarter is surely to find & take orders from an audience for the soft launch
zindex 12y ago
Who recognized the song from Iran so far away from the video: https://screen.yahoo.com/snl-digital-short-iran-far-000000189.html https://screen.yahoo.com/snl-digital-short-iran-far-00000018...
- pdeuchler 12y ago
  not to encourage OT discussion, but the song is "Avril 14th" by Aphex Twin... it sounds like the Lonely Island riffed off the main melody for "Iran So Far". The song is also the main sample in "Blame Game" by Kanye West from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
kiernan 12y ago
I'd like to see either an add-on which is a lamp bright enough to gradually wake you up with blue light, or for it to be able to work with things like LIFX or Phillips Hue to do the same.
dmazin 12y ago
How is this different/better than Zeo?
- donpdonp 12y ago
  Thanks for mentioning the Zeo. I used it for a month a few years ago. It was ahead of its time using 1-wire EEG monitoring. I felt the REM graph was actually telling me something. Any sleep monitor to try and take its place must be EEG based. An accelerometer is inadequate for sleep monitoring. The closest thing I know of is the OpenBCI.com project (Brain-Computer Interface) which is entirely an EEG project.
  - borgchick 12y ago
    I loved the idea of the Zeo, but as comfortable as the headband was, I never did manage to fall asleep with it on. I guess I am just super sensitive to things on my head while in bed. I ended up using the Zeo as a toy to do interesting BCI hacks with.
- apierre 12y ago
  You don't have to wear a chest strap on your forehead.
- rdl 12y ago
  It's inferior to the Zeo, but is not out of business, unlike Zeo. :(
- optimusprinceps 12y ago
  Zeo is dead
sly_g 12y ago
Wow, how did we survive for 100'000 years without it, I wonder.
joshfraser 12y ago
If you're being waken up every day by unnatural means, your body is not getting enough sleep. A few months ago I threw away my alarm clock. Now I just wake up whenever my body wants to. It's been great.
- toast0 12y ago
  That's great if your schedule fits your sleep schedule, but I'm not sure that's very common. A product that can wake you up in time for your schedule and avoid waking you in the middle of a sleep cycle could make it easier to make due with less sleep. At the extreme of little sleep required for newborn overnight feedings, for me, three hours of sleep is significantly worse than two or four. That said, sleep cycles tend to be shorter and shallower as the night goes on, after several hours of continuous sleep, the penalty for waking up at a bad point is not that bad.
- ramy_d 12y ago
  A few years ago I started waking up with the sun. Since then my waking experience has been great, I get a solid 7 every night and my day doesn't start with an abrupt bell. The sun is up, so I'm up.
- untog 12y ago
  That's great. For you. Now how about the people that have rigid job schedules?
apierre 12y ago
A part of me is really interested in these sleeping analytic devices but on the other hand, I am always sleeping with my phone on airplane mode. Not to enter the EMF debate, I wonder if being pinged all night long by all sort of waves is going to make my bedroom zen.
egypturnash 12y ago
Did they pay to license Aphex Twin's 'Avril 14th'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfYl6_f2Mdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfYl6_f2Mdg Huh, turns out they did. https://twitter.com/jamesproud/status/491986164937535488 https://twitter.com/jamesproud/status/491986164937535488 I am interested in this device but not Kickstarter backing interested. More like 3rd-gen price-drop interested.
rayiner 12y ago
Here is an interesting look at whether any of these sorts of devices actually work (in comparison to a real polysonogram): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-christopher-winter/sleep-tips_b_4792760.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-christopher-winter/sleep-ti.... The answer is: most of these things claim to be able to do a lot more with simple sensing techniques than they can actually do accurately.
- gr3yh47 12y ago
  If your room is too hot, sense will tell you ...in case your skin can't if your room is too bright, sense will tell you ...in case your eyes don't
  - apierre 12y ago
    If your room is too noisy, sense will send the data for further analysis ;)
  - jareds 12y ago
    I have no usable vision but can sometimes tell if a light is on. I don't know if light effects my sleeping though so that feature could actually be useful.
  - hoopism 12y ago
    Can it sense my wife's mood and flash a certain color so I know to make up the couch?
frio 12y ago
I grabbed a Beddit (http://www.beddit.com/ http://www.beddit.com/) off Indiegogo, which does something similar. Compared to Fitbit (put something on; remember to start it), apps (remember to start it) and others, I was hoping it would be frictionless -- hop into bed, start collecting metrics. Unfortunately, aside from the long (long) time required to deliver a useful Android app, it's failed me in a few ways. 1. You need the app running to collect metrics from the device (so, still some friction). I forget the app all the time; at the end of the day, I drop my phone on a charger and crawl into bed. Relying on humans to actively intervene is, unfortunately, suboptimal. 2. I was hoping it'd attach to my wifi and dump metrics to an API I could query (there's no smart alarm, so attaching it to my own stack of stuff seemed cool). Unfortunately, it sends data via a private Bluetooth protocol to your phone, rather than the wifi. Intercepting this is non-trivial (although the Android Bluetooth debugging stack helps). I'm trying to build a receiver on the Pi currently. 3. The API still doesn't really exist. My use case is slightly different from others. I've got a chronic condition, and I'm not really interested in "did I sleep well last night?", which Beddit seems to have targeted. I'm much more interested in trends over a period of time, once my illness flares -- "am I waking up more often?", "how much time am I spending in bed, rather than active?", "over the past week, how many times have I gotten up -- should I see a doctor?". This should correlate with other smart devices (scales -- "how much weight have I lost?"; fitbit -- "am I still relatively active?") to give me a more holistic view of my health. So, long-term data retention is important to me (CockroachDB looks quite neat!). Smart alarms and overnight statistics are interesting, but I hope companies developing devices for the quantified self start to pay more attention to long-term health data. It paints a far more interesting story :).
- aaronem 12y ago
  My Basis band addresses your point 1 quite well; all I have to do is wear it to bed. Unfortunately, there's no good API (and your choice of three variously lousy ones [1]), and it syncs in the same way as the Beddit does, i.e., via Bluetooth to a phone. (Or via USB to a computer, but that's not much more help.) I've thought about trying to MITM the data on its way out from the PC to Basis's sync endpoint, in order to see whether I can trap it there instead of having to query it back out of one of Basis's various APIs once it's synced. On the other hand, I've already got > 1 month of data synced, so I'm going to need some method of extracting data from their backend in any case. (But on the third hand, since Intel bought Basis and Basis apparently doesn't bother much with new development any more, I figure it might be handy to have a backend for sync data in case the hardware becomes otherwise useless.) [1] Two equally undocumented and unstable not-really-supposed-to-be-public APIs, for which various clients exist on Github in various states of disrepair, and a third, also undocumented but probably more stable, API which feeds their web UI..
scottmwinters 12y ago
Integrating this with Nest would make it one of the coolest and most useful embedded electronics on the market. What if it adjusted the temperature immediately and automatically when it determined that you were cold or hot? A sensor is great. Its really cool. But a control system that reacts based on the sensor data...thats a great device with a large market
dominotw 12y ago
Another kickstarter garbage with a sentimental promo. Next.
stratigos 12y ago
seems completely useless to me. the pretense of the video ad def confirmed my bias.
hoopism 12y ago
Those videos have no substance... I realize in marketing that it doesn't ALWAYS make sense to layout all the details but these types of wearable/smart devices have been blowing up and the claims get more and more vague. I get agitated watching these. I find myself saying "What does it actually do!?" throughout the whole thing. I could completely be missing the boat on this trend but things like this and the weird eyepatch that came up a while ago completely baffle me.
- exodust 12y ago
  The money shot is the alarm that apparently knows when you should wake up. I found the video hard to listen to. The guy has a bedside tone going on, a bit sleazy in his efforts to endorse the product with smooth caring ambience!
david_shaw 12y ago
From the landing page: >>> We all have a natural sleep cycle, but a normal alarm will wake you regardless. Sense’s Smart Alarm, knows the right time to wake you, so you will feel alert and refreshed. This is the part I like best. I wrote a web application (http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me) designed to let people calculate their own "optimized bed times" based on when they need to get up -- in other words, doing what Sense claims to do, but in reverse. The problem, of course, is that if your dog starts barking in the middle of the night, waking you up for an hour -- or if your sleep cycle lengths are significantly different from the norm -- then the app won't work. It's interesting to me, both because of the consistent traffic to sleepyti.me and the vast array of sleep apps and products, how neglected a good night's rest seems to be. I'm not sure if it's a cultural phenomenon or just a change in human sleep behavior, but everyone I know seems to be in a constant sleep deficit. If you look at products like Sense, FitBit, Beddit, Sleep Cycle (app), Sleepyti.me, etc, you'll notice that the market is supporting basic human function in those that aren't generally ill. I think it's indicative of a more serious problem that we -- especially in science and technology related fields -- can't seem to make ourselves go to bed. All of these hacks are great, and the metrics can be very useful... but in the end, nothing beats getting eight hours of sleep per night. Try it for a week or two; the difference might astound you.
- acrooks 12y ago
  Hi David, first of all, thank you very much for creating sleepyti.me - I use it almost every night when setting an alarm. Have you ever considered a responsive view of it so you can select your parameters more easily on a phone without having to zoom in?
- pyrocat 12y ago
  Oh, you made sleepyti.me? Thank you, it's a very useful website!
michaelZejoop 12y ago
Is there a use case for sleep interruptions due to bathroom trips for enlarged prostate? That would affect its utility (for some).
Fizzadar 12y ago
Sleep Cycle already does this - without the need for any extra items lying around... can't see how this improves on it.
ssivark 12y ago
I find the SleepBot app to be quite useful for a "fuzzy alarm". Simpler technology, and the app listens to you all night (kinda creepy, I agree) but the alarm works as desired. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lslk.sleepbot https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lslk.sleep...
_random_ 12y ago
no WP ? => trashcan
ambivalence 12y ago
Where's the bundle with the "Keep-My-5yo-Kid-Asleep-Until-My-Alarm-Goes-Off" option? Would pay for that.
jonemo 12y ago
> It simply attaches to your pillow and invisibly tracks your sleep at night. My pillow tends to be either outside my bed and/or occupied by my cat when I wake up. Would this device still work under those circumstances?
stinos 12y ago
Maybe I'm a bit paranoid but, even though afaik no proper research has found evidence of it, maybe putting a device that is constantly using wifi right next to your brain for the entire night might not be the best idea healthwise?
- cma 12y ago
  It isn't torrenting all night long, how many packets does it even send?
jonco91 12y ago
It's nice that it clips to your pillow and not to your body. Downside is the battery isn't rechargeable or replaceable.

104 points by clayallsopp 12y ago

The body works amazingly well when taken care of and listened too. Really. Instead of hyper tracking every aspect of your life [and making assumptions based on that data] Just exercise, eat well, no caffeine, minimal sugar/food after dark, get 10+min of sun around noon, go to sleep when tired. All of which is almost impossible for 90% of people who are forced into regimented, high stress, excessive work lives.

colmvp 12y ago
I love the taste of coffee and tea, both of which have caffeine. Curious, why 10+ minutes of sun at noon?
- apierre 12y ago
  Vitamin D I would guess
- arjunnarayan 12y ago
  I've found Trader Joe's "smooth and mello" decaf blend to be the only decaf blend that tastes like actual coffee. I can recommend it. I now drink about 2-4 cups of that stuff (french press brewed, and in the summer, cold-brewed overnight for iced coffee) and an espresso a day (the espresso machine at school has a caffeinated blend and I love espresso too much to stay away from it). This limits my caffeinated total to less than two cups a day (since decaf still has some non-negligible amount of caffeine).
- njharman 12y ago
  Body needs to know when to sleep. With all our artificial light it's easy to skew ones Circadian Rhythm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_clock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_clock
arjunnarayan 12y ago
I'd add in that you should avoid computer screens (or use some software like f.lux on the maximum dark setting) after the sun goes down. I'd also recommend watching your alcohol consumption in the evening as that significantly disrupts your sleep cycle.
- lpsz 12y ago
  No kidding -- I routinely code late into the night. Each time, I can't fall asleep if I didn't have f.lux on a fairly "yellow" setting. I (a) wish that something like that was built into iOS and (b) feel bad for people who don't know f.lux exists (or RedShift, for Linux folks.)
  - nikunjk 12y ago
    f.lux is the only reason I have a jailbroken iPhone. I can no longer stare into other people's phones at night without f.lux
mbillie1 12y ago
This is, sadly, advice which gets ignored by an overwhelming number of people in our industry. I know so many otherwise smart folks who buy a FitBit and track their caloric intake only to then drive (not go outside and walk) 2 blocks to get lunch at McDonalds or someplace similar. You don't need a product/app to live a healthy lifestyle... most likely if you are trying to solve a health/lifestyle problem by purchasing something, that is just symptomatic of yet another unhealthy aspect of your lifestyle.
- Brakenshire 12y ago
  > You don't need a product/app to live a healthy lifestyle You don't if you live within constraints which are healthy. Many people do not, because of their job, or because of the way their physical environment is set up - for instance, you may stand in a shop for 8 hours a day, and develop problems with your legs. The sensible thing to do is not to stand for 8 hours a day, but the reason why you may have done that before is because that is the expected, default behaviour. To change that so you are moving around enough not to cause damage requires deliberate and ongoing intervention, and something that tracks movement can certainly help with that. Likewise if you develop health problems from sitting for 8 hours a day.
- aaronem 12y ago
  > most likely if you are trying to solve a health/lifestyle problem by purchasing something, that is just symptomatic of yet another unhealthy aspect of your lifestyle Tell that to the thirty pounds I've lost, over the last couple months, by dint of using a Basis band to track calories out, and logging what I eat to do the same for calories in.
  - gordjw 12y ago
    Could you have done it without the band though?
    - aaronem 12y ago
      Not and have any idea how close I am to my target deficit; I'd either err low and fail to lose the weight, or err high and badly endanger my health via malnutrition. With the band, I know exactly where I'm coming in on a daily basis, and I can, for example, plot calorie deficit over delta-weight and see where I should be aiming for best effect. In general, I'm surprised to see such a Luddite attitude espoused on HN. What kind of engineer doesn't see the value in collecting the necessary data to characterize a problem or a process accurately? That's Step One.
bnejad 12y ago
Why no sugar/food after dark? Any links?
- wise_young_man 12y ago
  Food provides energy and when it isn't burned turns into fat.
  - bnejad 12y ago
    Looks like the juries out and many evidence still points to the total amount of calories in/out over the day is the only defining factor. http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-truth-myth-eating-night-causes-weight-gain http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-truth-myth-eating-ni...
- njharman 12y ago
  Sugar gives you energy, makes you hyper. Energy and hyper not conductive to sleep. nightime is sleeptime. As least that is what your body expects when not amped on caffeine, sugar and other stimulants.
austinjp 12y ago
While I agree with the sentiment here, the actual mechanics just don't hold true for plenty of people. Certainly the 80/20 rule probably applies: your suggestions will fix a great many issues for many people, and it's definitely worth reminding most people to make several of the changes you suggest -- particularly exercise and sleep. But if the recipe was really that simple for all people, more of us would experience more success. Humans are complex. Not mechanistically complex, stochastically. We're chaotic. One set of inputs may produce different outputs, and reverse-engineering the reasons for those differences may be "hard" or impossible. Apps and tracking devices can help reveal small areas where a fractional improvement in control or quality can have very large beneficial effects. Lifestyles and other highly personal factors mean that the application of a simple single formula will be met with varying success. And anyway, you have to measure the outcomes to understand how successful the intervention has been. I'd also point out that just because you feel well, it doesn't mean that your lifestyle or body (or mind) are healthy. Some attempt at objective data is useful to determine if you're really as healthy as you think you are. Sure, you may feel great if you get regular sleep every night. But did you know your sleep apnea puts you at increased risk of cardiovascular disease? Edit: probably a better example... You may feel perfectly fine sitting down for several hours per day. But you're at increased risk of a whole range of diseases. A timer set to beep evey 20 minutes to remind you to get up and move may actually add years to your life. This isn't a defence of lifestyle or health/fitness apps and so on, just a recognition that they work for some people, and for some circumstances. Or so it appears. This is the start of a vast, poorly coordinated longitudinal experiment. We'll be poring over the data for years yet.

dmix 12y ago

Looks very similar to http://www.withings.com/us/withings-aura.html http://www.withings.com/us/withings-aura.html I really want one of these (in general).

pat2man 12y ago
Yeah I don't think I would shell out for a Kickstarter that may never ship when there is a pretty comparable product already on the market.
- IanCal 12y ago
  Well the withings one isn't actually out yet, and it doesn't say how much it is.

philbarr 12y ago

What affects my sleep isn't me setting my alarm for the wrong time, it's my 13 week old baby. I'm sure I've seen a few things like this in the past. I wonder if they could adopt it for use as a baby monitor? We do currently have a sleep monitor but that just sets off an alarm if she hasn't moved in 20 seconds (or I pick her up and forget to turn the damn thing off, grrrr). I could see this being a really useful baby monitor that: - sets off an alarm if no movement in 20 seconds (important one this, obviously) - lets you know if your baby is drifting off into sleep or is basically just messing about and still wide awake. Like, are you going to be able to go to bed now or should you just make a brew? - a recording of and detailed description of sleep patterns during the night, so you've got an idea of how to organise your nights; like maybe you could work out when she's more likely to wake up at? - a history and some kind of comparison chart, because with babies it changes all the time, so you might be able to predict and adapt in advance. - an advance warning of when she's coming out of sleep. Babies go from slightly peckish to screaming their head off hungry in a couple of minutes, and it takes 5 minutes to warm a bottle. Having a "she's gonna need feeding soon alarm" would be really handy.

gingerlime 12y ago
I know this thing is personal/individual, and different books give difference advice, but we just had our baby boy sleep with us, until he was about 8 months old (quite long, I know, and our bed is pretty small). You really learn a lot about his patterns, movements, and you just feel him around. No need for monitors, setting things on/off, and no. We didn't suffocate him or squashed him. It was very natural to us (and him). I can wholeheartedly recommend it to new parents, and I can honestly say I miss him around now that he sleeps in his own bed just next to ours.
- philbarr 12y ago
  Yeah I think that would have been a nice thing to do, but there's no way we could after all the scare stories we were told.
  - zephjc 12y ago

mztan 12y ago

I wonder how applicable these kinds of devices are to babies. Are baby monitors already capable of similar types of sleep tracking?

apierre 12y ago
We have the Withings baby monitor with noise and movement tracking.

DougWebb 12y ago

So, a WiFi-attached device sitting in my bedroom with a high-sensitivity microphone, a proximity detector, and unknown software? I think I'll pass, even though the product seems cool and useful otherwise. Sure, I've got my cellphone in my bedroom at night and it's got the mic, network connection, and unknown software. But I figure there's a much better chance of someone discovering that Google or Sprint has installed a backdoor into my phone's OS or hardware that's sending recordings illicitly than there is of someone discovering the same thing about a niche product. If the software was open (such that I could compile and install it myself if I wanted to), and the collected data was open and available to me too, I'd be a lot more inclined to buy this. Those changes would also create the possibility of an add-on developer community that could be constantly providing new software capabilities to the device, which makes it even more compelling as a product. For example, philbarr is asking about a bunch of baby monitor features; those could all be added with software changes, I'd bet.

Brakenshire 12y ago
The first thing I look for with these products is whether there is an option for the data to stay local, or whether it is always sent directly to the cloud. I'm just not comfortable with that class of data being sent off site. This is one reason why I'm confused by the internet of things, is the model really going to be that we have pervasive black boxes sending continuous data feeds to god knows where?
xpose2000 12y ago
They offer an API. It states so in their kickstarter campaign. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hello/sense-know-more-sleep-better https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hello/sense-know-more-s...
- epi16 12y ago
  That's very different than being able to examine the source code and the data to see where everything is going. Also, though I'm not a rabid proponent of FOSS software, in this case, I would prefer to have many eyes on this code, since the authors are unknown (to me) and the data is sensitive.

fintler 12y ago

This is an idea that I hope becomes more widespread for operations folks -- optimizing what alerts to prioritize fixing based on the number that result in wakeup calls. At the Velocity conference this year, Etsy did an amazing talk on sleep and being oncall (I can't seem to find it on youtube?). They released an open source app that links their oncall system to a sleep device (jawbone or fitbit) at https://github.com/etsy/opsweekly https://github.com/etsy/opsweekly. Also, they had a nice graph which described how they were woken up less over the year because of this system. Having this metric as another layer behind primary error budgets (app downtime is inversely proportional to the number of times your devs get to deploy new features) is a nice way to keep your operations staff very happy.

joevandyk 12y ago

How does this work with cats walking on my pillow at three am? Does that mess up the sensors?

josefresco 12y ago
Also, how does it handle the 1-3 times I get up to pee, let the dogs out to pee, or grab a drink?

system_32 12y ago

Why do they need a kickstarter? They have the money for an entire team and are hiring more.

msutherl 12y ago
1. Advertising 2. Taking orders 3. Easy capital
macNchz 12y ago
That was my first thought. Crunchbase shows they raised $10.5m at the end of January(1). Now they need $100k of crowdfunding to build this thing? Disingenuous at best. [1]http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hello-inc http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hello-inc
- ernopp 12y ago
  the kickstarter is surely to find & take orders from an audience for the soft launch

zindex 12y ago

Who recognized the song from Iran so far away from the video: https://screen.yahoo.com/snl-digital-short-iran-far-000000189.html https://screen.yahoo.com/snl-digital-short-iran-far-00000018...

pdeuchler 12y ago
not to encourage OT discussion, but the song is "Avril 14th" by Aphex Twin... it sounds like the Lonely Island riffed off the main melody for "Iran So Far". The song is also the main sample in "Blame Game" by Kanye West from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

kiernan 12y ago

I'd like to see either an add-on which is a lamp bright enough to gradually wake you up with blue light, or for it to be able to work with things like LIFX or Phillips Hue to do the same.

dmazin 12y ago

How is this different/better than Zeo?

donpdonp 12y ago
Thanks for mentioning the Zeo. I used it for a month a few years ago. It was ahead of its time using 1-wire EEG monitoring. I felt the REM graph was actually telling me something. Any sleep monitor to try and take its place must be EEG based. An accelerometer is inadequate for sleep monitoring. The closest thing I know of is the OpenBCI.com project (Brain-Computer Interface) which is entirely an EEG project.
- borgchick 12y ago
  I loved the idea of the Zeo, but as comfortable as the headband was, I never did manage to fall asleep with it on. I guess I am just super sensitive to things on my head while in bed. I ended up using the Zeo as a toy to do interesting BCI hacks with.
apierre 12y ago
You don't have to wear a chest strap on your forehead.
rdl 12y ago
It's inferior to the Zeo, but is not out of business, unlike Zeo. :(
optimusprinceps 12y ago
Zeo is dead

sly_g 12y ago

Wow, how did we survive for 100'000 years without it, I wonder.

joshfraser 12y ago

If you're being waken up every day by unnatural means, your body is not getting enough sleep. A few months ago I threw away my alarm clock. Now I just wake up whenever my body wants to. It's been great.

toast0 12y ago
That's great if your schedule fits your sleep schedule, but I'm not sure that's very common. A product that can wake you up in time for your schedule and avoid waking you in the middle of a sleep cycle could make it easier to make due with less sleep. At the extreme of little sleep required for newborn overnight feedings, for me, three hours of sleep is significantly worse than two or four. That said, sleep cycles tend to be shorter and shallower as the night goes on, after several hours of continuous sleep, the penalty for waking up at a bad point is not that bad.
ramy_d 12y ago
A few years ago I started waking up with the sun. Since then my waking experience has been great, I get a solid 7 every night and my day doesn't start with an abrupt bell. The sun is up, so I'm up.
untog 12y ago
That's great. For you. Now how about the people that have rigid job schedules?

apierre 12y ago

A part of me is really interested in these sleeping analytic devices but on the other hand, I am always sleeping with my phone on airplane mode. Not to enter the EMF debate, I wonder if being pinged all night long by all sort of waves is going to make my bedroom zen.

egypturnash 12y ago

Did they pay to license Aphex Twin's 'Avril 14th'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfYl6_f2Mdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfYl6_f2Mdg Huh, turns out they did. https://twitter.com/jamesproud/status/491986164937535488 https://twitter.com/jamesproud/status/491986164937535488 I am interested in this device but not Kickstarter backing interested. More like 3rd-gen price-drop interested.

rayiner 12y ago

Here is an interesting look at whether any of these sorts of devices actually work (in comparison to a real polysonogram): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-christopher-winter/sleep-tips_b_4792760.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-christopher-winter/sleep-ti.... The answer is: most of these things claim to be able to do a lot more with simple sensing techniques than they can actually do accurately.

gr3yh47 12y ago
If your room is too hot, sense will tell you ...in case your skin can't if your room is too bright, sense will tell you ...in case your eyes don't
- apierre 12y ago
  If your room is too noisy, sense will send the data for further analysis ;)
- jareds 12y ago
  I have no usable vision but can sometimes tell if a light is on. I don't know if light effects my sleeping though so that feature could actually be useful.
- hoopism 12y ago
  Can it sense my wife's mood and flash a certain color so I know to make up the couch?

frio 12y ago

I grabbed a Beddit (http://www.beddit.com/ http://www.beddit.com/) off Indiegogo, which does something similar. Compared to Fitbit (put something on; remember to start it), apps (remember to start it) and others, I was hoping it would be frictionless -- hop into bed, start collecting metrics. Unfortunately, aside from the long (long) time required to deliver a useful Android app, it's failed me in a few ways. 1. You need the app running to collect metrics from the device (so, still some friction). I forget the app all the time; at the end of the day, I drop my phone on a charger and crawl into bed. Relying on humans to actively intervene is, unfortunately, suboptimal. 2. I was hoping it'd attach to my wifi and dump metrics to an API I could query (there's no smart alarm, so attaching it to my own stack of stuff seemed cool). Unfortunately, it sends data via a private Bluetooth protocol to your phone, rather than the wifi. Intercepting this is non-trivial (although the Android Bluetooth debugging stack helps). I'm trying to build a receiver on the Pi currently. 3. The API still doesn't really exist. My use case is slightly different from others. I've got a chronic condition, and I'm not really interested in "did I sleep well last night?", which Beddit seems to have targeted. I'm much more interested in trends over a period of time, once my illness flares -- "am I waking up more often?", "how much time am I spending in bed, rather than active?", "over the past week, how many times have I gotten up -- should I see a doctor?". This should correlate with other smart devices (scales -- "how much weight have I lost?"; fitbit -- "am I still relatively active?") to give me a more holistic view of my health. So, long-term data retention is important to me (CockroachDB looks quite neat!). Smart alarms and overnight statistics are interesting, but I hope companies developing devices for the quantified self start to pay more attention to long-term health data. It paints a far more interesting story :).

aaronem 12y ago
My Basis band addresses your point 1 quite well; all I have to do is wear it to bed. Unfortunately, there's no good API (and your choice of three variously lousy ones [1]), and it syncs in the same way as the Beddit does, i.e., via Bluetooth to a phone. (Or via USB to a computer, but that's not much more help.) I've thought about trying to MITM the data on its way out from the PC to Basis's sync endpoint, in order to see whether I can trap it there instead of having to query it back out of one of Basis's various APIs once it's synced. On the other hand, I've already got > 1 month of data synced, so I'm going to need some method of extracting data from their backend in any case. (But on the third hand, since Intel bought Basis and Basis apparently doesn't bother much with new development any more, I figure it might be handy to have a backend for sync data in case the hardware becomes otherwise useless.) [1] Two equally undocumented and unstable not-really-supposed-to-be-public APIs, for which various clients exist on Github in various states of disrepair, and a third, also undocumented but probably more stable, API which feeds their web UI..

scottmwinters 12y ago

Integrating this with Nest would make it one of the coolest and most useful embedded electronics on the market. What if it adjusted the temperature immediately and automatically when it determined that you were cold or hot? A sensor is great. Its really cool. But a control system that reacts based on the sensor data...thats a great device with a large market

dominotw 12y ago

Another kickstarter garbage with a sentimental promo. Next.

stratigos 12y ago

seems completely useless to me. the pretense of the video ad def confirmed my bias.

hoopism 12y ago

Those videos have no substance... I realize in marketing that it doesn't ALWAYS make sense to layout all the details but these types of wearable/smart devices have been blowing up and the claims get more and more vague. I get agitated watching these. I find myself saying "What does it actually do!?" throughout the whole thing. I could completely be missing the boat on this trend but things like this and the weird eyepatch that came up a while ago completely baffle me.

exodust 12y ago
The money shot is the alarm that apparently knows when you should wake up. I found the video hard to listen to. The guy has a bedside tone going on, a bit sleazy in his efforts to endorse the product with smooth caring ambience!

david_shaw 12y ago

From the landing page: >>> We all have a natural sleep cycle, but a normal alarm will wake you regardless. Sense’s Smart Alarm, knows the right time to wake you, so you will feel alert and refreshed. This is the part I like best. I wrote a web application (http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me) designed to let people calculate their own "optimized bed times" based on when they need to get up -- in other words, doing what Sense claims to do, but in reverse. The problem, of course, is that if your dog starts barking in the middle of the night, waking you up for an hour -- or if your sleep cycle lengths are significantly different from the norm -- then the app won't work. It's interesting to me, both because of the consistent traffic to sleepyti.me and the vast array of sleep apps and products, how neglected a good night's rest seems to be. I'm not sure if it's a cultural phenomenon or just a change in human sleep behavior, but everyone I know seems to be in a constant sleep deficit. If you look at products like Sense, FitBit, Beddit, Sleep Cycle (app), Sleepyti.me, etc, you'll notice that the market is supporting basic human function in those that aren't generally ill. I think it's indicative of a more serious problem that we -- especially in science and technology related fields -- can't seem to make ourselves go to bed. All of these hacks are great, and the metrics can be very useful... but in the end, nothing beats getting eight hours of sleep per night. Try it for a week or two; the difference might astound you.

acrooks 12y ago
Hi David, first of all, thank you very much for creating sleepyti.me - I use it almost every night when setting an alarm. Have you ever considered a responsive view of it so you can select your parameters more easily on a phone without having to zoom in?
pyrocat 12y ago
Oh, you made sleepyti.me? Thank you, it's a very useful website!

michaelZejoop 12y ago

Is there a use case for sleep interruptions due to bathroom trips for enlarged prostate? That would affect its utility (for some).

Fizzadar 12y ago

Sleep Cycle already does this - without the need for any extra items lying around... can't see how this improves on it.

ssivark 12y ago

I find the SleepBot app to be quite useful for a "fuzzy alarm". Simpler technology, and the app listens to you all night (kinda creepy, I agree) but the alarm works as desired. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lslk.sleepbot https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lslk.sleep...

_random_ 12y ago

no WP ? => trashcan

ambivalence 12y ago

Where's the bundle with the "Keep-My-5yo-Kid-Asleep-Until-My-Alarm-Goes-Off" option? Would pay for that.

jonemo 12y ago

> It simply attaches to your pillow and invisibly tracks your sleep at night. My pillow tends to be either outside my bed and/or occupied by my cat when I wake up. Would this device still work under those circumstances?

stinos 12y ago

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid but, even though afaik no proper research has found evidence of it, maybe putting a device that is constantly using wifi right next to your brain for the entire night might not be the best idea healthwise?

cma 12y ago
It isn't torrenting all night long, how many packets does it even send?

jonco91 12y ago

It's nice that it clips to your pillow and not to your body. Downside is the battery isn't rechargeable or replaceable.