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Comment by redidas | Hacker News Reader

What if this was taken one step further and integrated with an alarm app for your phone? That would be a more useful implementation of this idea to me than a web page would be.

You could provide a time range of 60 to 90 minutes of when you need to get up, then press a button on the app to "set" it when you go to bed. The alarm could then figure out when the best time would be for you to get up in your provided time range.

Granted this assumes your audiences bed time varies from day to day, which probably isn't the best for someone trying to get the best sleep in the first place.

You could also do the reverse, set a wake-up time and have an alarm go off as a reminder for upcoming bedtimes...

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The YC 09 startup WakeMate (http://wakemate.com/) took this much further: (Edit - Took down my run-on sentence describing them, here's their pitch)

The WakeMate is a comfortable wristband that you wear when you sleep. It measures subtle body movements—a scientifically proven method (Actigraphy) to map dips and peaks in your sleep cycle. The wristband communicates directly with your mobile phone to calculate the ideal wake time closest to your alarm setting. When you wake up, your night's sleep data is automatically uploaded to Wakelytics™, our online analytics platform.

Their blog (http://blog.wakemate.com/) and live support seem to be down at the moment. Anyone know how they're doing?

I do not know if wakemate made any improvements lately but after giving it a try several times after I got it, I gave up. It sits in a box alongside old power adapters and other cables.

The main problem for me was when I toss and turn at night, it loses contact with the phone (sitting on the end table) and starts screaming 'Lost contact, lost contact'.

If I continued to use it, my wife would have thrown me out onto the patio to sleep.

There were several other occasions where wakemate never woke me up.

I would have loved to see wakemate work, I wanted to root for a startup, see them succeed. You only get so many chances with a single customer. In my books, they failed badly on their promise. continuously. starting with their delivery of the product and then later with the product itself.

Hope it's OK to post this here, but the "Sleep as a Droid" App, which does what you describe and so much more, really changed my life for the better.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.urbandroid.sleep

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