
WakeMate review - shawndumas
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/21/wakemate-review/
======
gnemeth
The review unit that engadget was given was a beta unit. We made the reviewer
aware of this and unfortunately he didn't cut us any slack.

As he mentioned we fixed the bugs that we was experiencing. Also we should not
that he was using an Android unit, which was the most buggy of all the
platforms. The UX on the iPhone and Blackberry for review units, was much more
stable.

~~~
TimStevens
Hate to do this here, Greg, but...

I specifically asked whether devices were shipping to customers and you
indicated that they were, at the same time that you sent me a replacement
WakeMate unit. If this is not final hardware I reviewed then what is being
sent to consumers?

Secondly, you never expressed any concerns about my testing on Android and I
was quite clear with you about the issues I was having, and even delayed the
review so that I could use a more recent version of the software.

Finally, when you contacted me and offered me a WakeMate in the first place
the subject was "WakeMate review unit" and inside that e-mail you repeatedly
used the word "review."

I'm sorry, but I can't cut any slack on a reviewable product that is shipping
to customers.

I'd also ask that if you have further concerns you contact me directly rather
than posting here.

Sincerely,

-tim stevens (dude who wrote the review)

~~~
gnemeth
Tim - sorry for any confusion - lets finish this discussion offline.

~~~
MichaelApproved
Wait. Don't leave us hanging!

~~~
jberryman
What am I going to do with all this popcorn :(

~~~
TimStevens
Well, I won't share the fun interplay behind the scenes, but I will say
there's an update in the review. WakeMate shipped me another wristband to try,
the third, plus another new version of the app. This performed no better than
the previous ones.

------
latortuga
Interesting review. This is the first negative review I've read of this
device; I'm surprised considering the thread that was up this past weekend was
incredibly positive, with beta testers giving glowing reviews. Has anybody
else had issues with the battery? With the app crashing? These seem like
things that would be found in beta testing and would be pretty obvious.

Reference link: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020811>

Edit: fixed the link

~~~
garbowza
I've been beta testing the WakeMate for a couple months.

The battery lasts about 2 nights, and knowing this, I recharge it every night.
Since doing so, it hasn't run out of batteries during the night.

The app crashed a lot initially (I'm on Android), but that was months back and
the WakeMate guys were good about using the feedback data I sent to fix the
bugs. It hasn't crashed for me in weeks, since I installed their latest
version.

Edit: I meant I recharge the wristband every other night, not every night.

~~~
plusbryan
Agreed. This honestly seems like my experience with the early beta, which did
seem pretty buggy. The production version has fixed a lot of these issues, so
I'm a little surprised that this version would exhibit some of these same
issues. That's too bad.

------
rodh257
Pretty average review really, spent the whole time talking about a few bugs
which are no doubt being sorted out. Fair enough they are warning that it is
buggy but surely they could have worked around them and talked about the
actual main purpose of the device in more depth, which is, waking you up at
the optimal time. He basically got frustrated and didn't test that properly.

In a couple of weeks/months when those specific bugs are sorted out this
review will be absolutely worthless. I look forward to seeing a review based
on how someone felt after having it wake you each morning for a while.

~~~
nroach
If the product doesn't work and perform its intended task, then what's the
point of reviewing the feature bullets?

I know that personally there's nothing as disappointing as reading glowing
reviews of a product's potential, only to find that I a paid good money for
what should have been a pre-release product. Sure, as a developer there's
always a push to just ship it and get some "traction" but the flip side of
that is that doing so risks alienating customers (and reviewers).

If I'm a customer looking to make a purchase, what you're implying is that "in
a couple of weeks/months when those specific bugs are sorted out this
[product] will [no longer] be absolutely worthless." Is that really the
standard customers should expect?

It's nice to see a reviewer as a customer advocate occasionally rather than
just recite the bullet points of a press release.

~~~
Havoc
The theory is pretty sound imo:

REM atonia, a state in which the motor neurons are not stimulated and thus the
body's muscles do not move. [From
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REM_atonia#Physiology>]

~~~
jpark
I would totally disagree that the theory is sound. The fact wrist-based
actigraphy correlates at all with REM phases is not scientifically validated
in any robust way.

------
boreacrat
I thought this was a gadget to help you wake up at the ideal time? Seems the
author of the review didn't leave this much thought and didn't write about it
before commenters asked for it.

I agree with the reviewers scepticism towards the usefulness of the
statistics, but I am interested in buying this to make my mornings better, not
analyzing my sleeping patterns.

~~~
citricsquid
Exactly, it read like the reviewer thought it was an alarm clock...

~~~
sbisker
Setting user expectation is a design problem that can't just be brushed away
if there is any desire in this thing going mainstream. The user _will_ come
into the device with misconceptions - it's up to the designer to manage those
misconceptions and help the user through any such "user errors" gracefully. A
key teaching of service design is that often it's just as appreciated - if not
moreso - to guide the user through any issues gracefully, than to not let the
mistakes happen at all.

Perhaps this review was just a fluke. And yes, it's a V1 - at least as far as
feedback from the real world goes. But to me, a lot of the things that
surprised him (that having a partner would influence the readings negatively,
for instance) also surprised me. I would be hesitant to give something like
this as a gift to a "mainstream" person (a "normie", if you will) right now -
just because I would worry that WakeMate's manual/interface/whatever isn't yet
ready to help my friend through any misconceptions they might have.

------
beefman
Please fix the 'must set alarm' thing! I got one of these for my wife for
Christmas. For some reason I assumed it had a vibration alarm, but that's no
big deal since she'll mainly be interested in the analytics. But we definitely
can't have any chance of an audio alarm going off around her wake time.

~~~
gnemeth
We do support a vibration alarm on the phone and if you only want to use the
analytics you can just set an alarm for the middle of the day as a fix until
we release the analytics only fix.

------
DrStalker
My question is "how does this compare to a $2 iPhone app like Sleep Cycle?"

Those apps (I assume there are clones of the one I used) measure the overall
bed movement to track sleep depth, and have worked very well for me. Will
wrapping something around my wrist do any better?

------
Deadsunrise
I was waiting for reviews of the wakemate but now I think I'm getting a Zeo.
At least it will know when I'm awake and not my girlfriend.

Logging just the movement of the wrist is almost useless. It's better to
properly monitor the different phases of sleep trough the night measuring
brain activity.

~~~
invisible
So you made the jump from a $60 product to a $200 product based on one review?
I'm not certain either way, but if you can wait I'd wait for a few real
reviews that are in-depth.

------
sgoraya
> _...there's the obvious question of what the heck do you do with all this
> data? If you have a crummy night sleeping you're going to wake up and have a
> bunch of graphs and charts that basically say "Yup, you sure had a crummy
> night." You can apply tags to the data, things like "cat scratch" or "creepy
> owl outside window" to help you figure out why your evenings aren't as
> restful as they should be. But, really, wouldn't a pen and piece of paper
> achieve much the same thing?_

I was about to pre-order a wakemate several months ago, but I had the same
lingering thoughts above and canceled my order;

> _There are a lot of people asking in comments whether the thing managed to
> make us feel more refreshed when waking up, and the simple answer is no.
> That's because, more often than not, the battery was dead by the morning or
> for some other reason the wristband failed to trigger the alarm._

Considering the wakemate had several delays prior to launch, looks like they
should have let it bake a little longer...

------
iamelgringo
So, as a critical care nurse with 18 years of experience, and as someone who
has been seeing a sleep medicine physician for multiple sleep disturbances for
several years, I feel inclined to say something.

I have my doubts about the premise that if people are awakened when they move
their arms, they will wake up more refreshed. If Wake Mate has done studies
showing this is true rather than personal anecdote, I'd love to read it.

What WakeMate refers to on their website as "Actigraphy" is a method that
sleep medicine uses to measure sleep/wake cycles and circadian rhythms by
measuring arm movements. I know it has been used during sleep studies, and
some of the literature I read showed this, but the studies I read showed that
Actigraphy was better used in longitudinal studies. People do tend to move
around a lot less when they are in bed sleeping, and they move around a lot
more when they are awake. But actigraphy seems to be especially uuseful in
capturing data over the course of several weeks rather than during a
particular sleep cycle.

I would love to read some research on this, if WakeMate has it. What I was
able to find online were these references [1]. And, it seems like they are
saying that actigraphy is much better at measuring cycles of
wakefulness/sleepyness over long periods of time rather than measuring depth
of sleep.

Also:

 _These limitations rely on how to decide if someone is awake or asleep
(automatic scoring algorithms) and not on the activity measurement itself.
However, regarding the sleep-wake pattern during daily routine, the actigraphy
seems to add more naturalistic information. Thus, it might be helpful for
monitoring sleep-wake patterns of insomnia, rhythm disorders, and inadequate
perception of sleep in longitudinal studies. Actigraphy might even replace the
self-assessment of sleep in some circumstances as it has been reported that
patients with insomnia not only underestimate the duration of sleep but also
overestimate the sleep latency.22 The American Academy of Sleep Medicine23
considers that actigraphy might help the assessment of the sleep-wake pattern
of insomnia patients for extend periods, thus providing data not usually
measured by PSG._ [2]

From what I know, wouldn't measurement of rapid eye movements be better at
providing data on when to people wake up?

That being said, I do think that you guys might have a great direction in home
sleep measurement.

I have sleep apnea. I stop breathing or under breath to the point of rousing
me from sleep about 30 times an hour. I've undergone extensive testing for
this, and it's really expensive to provide that testing ($3000 to 5000 per
sleep study). A lot of nurses that I work with know that their husband snores,
and wake themselves up at night. But, those nurses have a very hard time
convincing their husband that they need to go see a doctor about it.

If you could provide an inexpensive way to tell a person that they stopped
breathing for 30 to 45 seconds at a time several hundred times a night. It
would probably be a lot easier to convince that person that they need to go
see a doctor.

/$0.02

ref:

[1]
[http://www.aasmnet.org/Resources/PracticeParameters/PP_Actig...](http://www.aasmnet.org/Resources/PracticeParameters/PP_Actigraphy_Circ.pdf)

[2]
[http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:E06qD_EZLSYJ:w...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:E06qD_EZLSYJ:www.journalsleep.org/Articles/260111.pdf+actigraphy+sleep+study&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESh50-olBbYd-
bduJ1GpLgMNAQ7cg-e849GxKjKf7JwNZRE55dj0fB-
SY15V8vYGp3qitZ6GgFLP_WRCqo7aYiu25j0-DdZvm8uJSAXwEhEDef6BXaw7N0pM2ng0h1ZB3rmTGtOG&sig=AHIEtbT3DBFfF5ewL4wAz3UOi5c-Af60aA)
pp 84

Updates: Clarification of some statements.

~~~
tptacek
Erin thinks I do this, too. I flat-out don't believe her (oh, I know I snore,
but she's concerned about the health implications, not the snoring). Here's my
logic: I'm 34, I get 4-6 hours of sleep a night, and I'm never drowsy during
the day. If apnea was messing up my sleep, wouldn't it stand to reason that
I'd feel like hell?

(I'm asking because you've given this a lot of thought.)

Are you _still_ a trauma nurse by the way? You are my hero.

~~~
iamelgringo
re: current gig.

I'm still working ER in a lovely part of Silicon Valley. I stopped doing
trauma several years ago. With any luck, I'll be able to stop boot strapping
in the next 6 months, and leave nursing behind for good.

re: sleep apnea

The problem with Sleep Apnea, is that you adjust to how you feel. I thought
that one of my biggest problems was the shift work that I was doing. I would
have jags, where I would sleep 4 hours, and then be up for 12 to 16 hours.
Turned out, after a couple of sleep studies I was waking myself up after 4
hours because I was suffocating repeatedly while I slept. When I woke up after
4 hours it was because my body had jolted itself awake with a surge of
adrenalin, because I had desperately needed oxygen.

Sleep apnea is correlated quite highly with nasty long term diseases like
pulmonary hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and obesity. Your
whole cardio vascular system is over worked because it struggles with oxygen
deprivation for 1/3 of each day. It also messes with your endocrine system
(stress hormones, insulin production, adrenalin production, etc...) because
your body isn't able to get a full 8 hours of rest and recharging. Instead,
it's is constantly stressed ( releasing adrenalin and cortisol) throughout the
night, and it leads to things like constant hunger throughout the day.

Since getting treatment, I've lost about 30 lbs, my blood pressure has dropped
20 points. A bigger personal benefit, was that I found that I was able to get
into programming flow a lot easier (not as fuzzy), and I was able to program
for several hours at a stretch longer than I was able to 2 years ago.

And, I find that I don't need to have a cup of coffee to get myself through
the day. I don't drink caffeine at all, now.

~~~
tptacek
If your cortisol levels are all wonky because of sleep apnea, you'd think a
blood test might indicate that. Being stabbed with a needle sounds a lot more
pleasant than a sleep study.

Were you regularly tired? What finally pushed you over the edge to look into
sleep medicine? I'm wondering if there's something symptomy I should be
looking for.

Note that 51% of Wikipedians believe that "The hallmark symptom of obstructive
sleep apnea syndrome in adults is excessive daytime sleepiness. Typically, an
adult or adolescent with severe long-standing obstructive sleep apnea will
fall asleep for very brief periods in the course of usual daytime activities
if given any opportunity to sit or rest. This behavior may be quite dramatic,
sometimes occurring during conversations with others at social gatherings".

It's not "let's diagnose Thomas" day on HN or anything, but: nobody who spends
any time with me during the day thinks I'm epsilon from falling asleep.

How did you end up as an ER nurse? How did the state transition from ER nurse
to startup developer start happening? I've known about your profession for
ages but never thought to ask about it.

~~~
iamelgringo
_Being stabbed with a needle sounds a lot more pleasant than a sleep study._

Sleep studies are a bit of a pain in the ass, but the time I've invested in
getting my sleep problems figured has been one of the highest ROI of most
anything medical I've put myself through, including my cleft lip repair. I
_love_ my sleep doctor. They are crazy smart. They do a 5 to 7 year residency
after med school. 3 - 4 years medicine. 1-2 years critical care/pulmonary
fellowship. 1-2 year sleep medicine fellowship. They are generally happy
doctors, because they have a pretty good lifestyle (High billing rate, 9 to 5
work week without call.) as opposed to other high end specialties like
Cardiology, Intensivists, etc..

So, the sleep study is the unpleasant bit. Just be sure that you go to a sleep
clinic in the richest neighborhood around. You'll get the best trained doctors
and the happiest staff working for them. (Most of their patients have good
health insurance).

re: Symptoms of Obstructive Sleep Apnea:

What you are describing is narcolepsy, which can indeed be a byproduct of
sever obstructive sleep apnea. If you go to a sleep doctor, they will give you
a battery of tests like "sleepiness scales", basic tests for depression,
questions about your sleep patterns, etc... People with Severe sleep apnea
(and concomitant narcolepsy) will fall asleep at very inopportune times. My
wife's grandfather was notorious for falling asleep mid sentence. He died of
Congestive heart failure.

I never fell asleep during conversations, but the likelihood of falling asleep
on a long car ride when my wife was driving was extremely high. I'd also
struggle to stay awake while watching TV with my wife in a dark room, and I'd
occasionally fall asleep in a movie theater. I had always chalked my
sleepiness to working the night shift for years.

The best symptom: Your wife tells you that you stop breathing when you sleep.
:)

You're not going to notice much, because you are the proverbial frog in the
kettle. You have been slowly adjusting to decreased oxygen levels, and
increasing periods of hypopnea (under breathing) or apea (stop breathing) for
years. As I said, I had chalked it up to working nights for years. It wasn't
until my sleep disturbances really became severe, and my sleep pattern started
interfering with work that I went to the doctor.

That being said, I was completely stunned with the results of my first sleep
study. As a critical care nurse, I routinely intubate people (put them on a
ventilator/life support) when their oxygen saturation (percentage of
hemoglobin saturated with oxygen) goes down to 80%. Normal is 95 to 100%, and
there's an exponential decay (read patients get much sicker much quicker )
after O2 Sats drop below 90 - 92%. [1]

I almost crapped my pants, when my doctor told me that my Oxygen Saturation
routinely dropped into the mid 80's and the lowest it got was 82%. Meaning,
that if I were a patient in my ER, and having symptoms of difficulty
breathing, I would want to put myself on life support if those numbers
sustained themselves.

Needless to say, I got busy and started to take care of things. What's amazed
me most, is how much better I can focus on programming now. I'm also a lot
"sharper" now, even though I never would have thought I was fuzzy before
treatment.

re: nursing.

send me an email, and I'll be glad to tell you the story. This thread is
getting a little too off topic. :)

Besides, I gotta run out the door and catch a plane.

ref:

[1]
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Oxyhaemog...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Oxyhaemoglobin_dissociation_curve.png)

~~~
josh_frome
Thanks for going into detail on this. I've been putting off getting a
recommended sleep study done and this is good motivation.

------
flip
Seems like the WakeMate guys are desperate to burn bridges. There are proper
channels for addressing negative reviews... This isn't one of them. It's
difficult for me to maintain interest in a company that doesn't respond to
criticism with a promise to do better in the future. Oh well.

------
livando
Fair review, but I'm still pumped for mine to arrive. I don't mind supporting
smart people trying to innovate, and I'm betting the app will be getting
better all the time.

~~~
bloggergirl
I totally agree. WakeMate is way more cost-effective a solution than any of
its competitors... And the 'personal sleep analytics' (or whatever) could
really help busy people make better sense of the practical ways to improve
their sleep habits.

As with all cool things -- esp. cool startups -- a little patience can help.
Greg and the WakeMate crew will surely continue to innovate and improve.

One so-so review is exactly that: one review. Plenty of other reviews to come.

------
coverband
The device or the s/w might have some problems, but the team is dedicated to
fixing them and not leaving their customers out in the cold, I'm willing to
spare my hard-earned cash to support an innovative idea. Which I did,
incidentally, earlier today after getting their "your WakeMate is ready"
email.

I have a serious problem with sleep apnea, and if this gadget can help me wake
up fresher, it's priced right for me.

~~~
tpz
My mother suffers from severe (but now under treatment) sleep apnea and
believe me when I tell you that if left untreated it could cause you far
larger problems than wanting to feel fresher when you wake up.

Please, please, please see your doctor about the _cause_ of your sleep apnea
before treating its obvious _symptoms_ with a device like the WakeMate.

~~~
coverband
Thanks for the sincere advice. :O) (I didn't want to give details for privacy
reasons, but I'm already under treatment for it with a CPAP device. WM will
not be a replacement.)

------
kin
Hmm, typical Engagdet review IMO.

First off, the battery is a non-issue to me. If it lasts 2-3 nights then I'll
charge it every night like I do every other device I have, which is what most
people do to my knowledge.

Second, if I'm trying to analyze my sleep statistics, I don't think I, nor
anyone else can resort to pen and paper to effectively study several nights of
sleep and the many factors to sleep.

Next, if you're sleeping with someone else and intend to wake up, how is the
method in which the Wakemate wakes you any more intrusive than a regular
alarm? In fact, it is a regular alarm. I'm sure he simply imagined a vibrating
wristband and so was disappointed with a regular alarm. Which is fine, but,
vibration could also just as easily annoy others. It's personal preference and
not poor design.

Finally, what irks me most is that he complains about the Wakemate setting off
when you're already awake. Complaining about this tells me he doesn't know
what the Wakemate is. It wakes you up at the optimal time such that he feels
refreshed. If he's already awake and wants to chill in bed, that's a personal
preference. Though I personally would enjoy doing the same it is precisely
this habit that causes me to fall asleep again and then wake up at a non-
optimal moment and end up not feeling groggy. The point is to wake up
refreshed and I feel he missed the point there.

------
invisible
I'm not saying negativity is something bad, but this guy just seems spiteful.
It's a brand new product and this guy probably doesn't even need the benefit
of it waking him up at a good time. He complained (sorry, repeatedly
complained 20 times) about the battery, but despite knowing it only lasts 2
days he refused to charge it after 2 days. I don't get that all.

~~~
jamesaguilar
The battery bit I am with you. I don't understand for example why people
complain that smartphones need to be charged every day. It's not that much of
an inconvenience. Please, just plug in your phone.

On the other hand, a product's being new does not entitle it to soft treatment
in a review. Even without the battery issue, it sounds like this device is not
ready for prime time.

~~~
invisible
I think you're right except if you look at his review, half of his points deal
with the battery not lasting 3 days. All of the other points had to deal with
the app crashing when he said "I'm awake early." I doubt this applies to all
phones too (even different Android phones). This also means the app/software
can be improved.

    
    
      "The score is based on the failures of this thing to operate, not questions relating to data relevance or actual ability to improve sleep cycles."
    

Where is the actual review of, "OK, so I recharged it every night, it woke me
up before my alarm, and it did/didn't work." This review is useless for that.

------
ljf
To those focusing on the battery and issues raised by reviewer...

Yes, as the device kept telling him it could last for longer. If I had a car
that I found only really went 100 miles on a full tank, but kept telling me it
was half full still, I would be pissed, and I would focus on that.

This is a gadget review, not a life review. You dont see their other reviews
taking on how items affect your life, just the quality and appropriatness of
the product. Why did you think this would be different.

In all, if I were reviewing a car that had this many issues I would not focus
on what the drive is like, I would not be doing my job if I didnt address the
failings of this item. It seems loads of people here want the reviewer to just
ignore these issues.

What do YOU want from your reviewers?

------
sp4rki
So this is basically a review of the battery life... The reviewer was
basically too busy to charge the device every couple of days and then
complains that the device runs out of juice? It's like he wanted the gadget to
fail so he could write a review chastising it. Even worse is the fact that the
little it did focus on the actual usage, was complaining about how he doesn't
know what to do with the analytics' data.

Would it have been such a hard thing to do to charge the device once a day (as
he probably already does with his phone) and report on the actual point of the
device? We want to know if it wakes you up at the right moment, not if the
analytics are useless for you and that you forget to charge gadgets.

~~~
silencio
I don't know about you, but everything the reviewer addressed was important to
me.

Battery life being too short or being misreported means the device won't
consistently work to wake me up, which kind of defeats the purpose of having
something like the wakemate.

Not being able to associate my sleep data/patterns with events I know occurred
during my sleep means that data is next to useless to me. I've used devices
like this before to improve my sleep as well as to wake me up on time every
day. If I didn't have a diary and good analytics for what I did use (which
honestly, I haven't found yet so I'm rolling my own to use with an iPhone
alarm clock-type app...if someone would come in and fix this problem and roll
it into a nice device I'd be all over their product), I wouldn't have known a
lot of information about my habits that affect sleep. For example, I wouldn't
have known that it was my punctual neighbor's certain actions that disturb me
every weekday at 9am, which meant that if I wake up after 9 I feel more tired
and annoyed because I didn't sleep as well as I do on weekends after 9am. (I
eventually worked around this problem and feel a lot more rested nowadays.)

Even the additional points the review mentioned about how it works with other
people in bed matter to me. All these little things are things I think about
when I look at purchasing gadgets like wakemate. Not everyone cares only about
waking up...anything can try to do that from a $5 alarm clock to your phone, a
significant other, and much more expensive gadgets. Wakemate has the potential
to do more than just a dinky alarm clock, so I want to see what came of it.

~~~
sp4rki
The guys behind Wakemate have already stated publicly that the battery lasts 2
to 3 days (actually 24 hours) depending on your sleeping patterns. The
reviewer said that the apparatus ran out of juice at the end of the third day.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that he should charge the damn thing every
second day. Would you NOT (on purpose of course) charge your smartphone on the
second day, when you know that it just doesn't last the full third day?
Instead of charging the device every second day the reviewer decided to keep
pushing for the three days that he fully knows the device doesn't last for him
and his sleeping patterns. Battery estimates are just that, estimates, and
vary greatly depending on the amount of usage a device gets. The reviewer knew
that that thing is not lasting three days for him, and the review is a sarcasm
ridden piece on how he was fooled to think that it would when the website
clearly states that it might not last 3 days for everyone and actually depends
on your sleeping patterns.

Read the review again and you'll notice that the Wakemate does have all those
things you want in an analytics package, but the reviewer dismissed it with a
wave of sarcasm because according to him the only use for analytics and tags
(for events, as you mention you want) are to tell you that you had a "crummy
night." You will also notice that he states that the Wakemate works with YOUR
movements as opposed to the movements of whomever you're in bed with, but he
says this in a way that it's easy to misinterpret it the other way around.
Immediately after the fact he starts complaining that the alarm might wake
your significant other, which any alarm will do.

My point is not that the review speaks negatively of the Wakemate, I don't
even own one and really don't care much about it, but the review was
completely lopsided. It belittled every good thing the device has (the
analytics, the tagging, the raw data, the fact that it works even with other
people on the bed, etc) and made a big deal about something that not only is
not a bug deal, but works exactly as is stated by the product manufacturer.
Other than the pairing issues the reviewer had, the rest of the review read
like a sarcasm ridden payed "anti-advertisement" against the Wakemate.

------
rdl
I want something with EEG sensing like the Zeo, but which talks all night to
my computer, vs. having to download to an SD card. Then, based on if anyone
has added morning meetings to my schedule, or traffic is heavy, or flights are
delayed, it wakes me up gently by increasing ambient lighting in the room,
temperature, music etc. If I don't wake up, it can become increasingl
insistent, and most importantly, if I go back to sleep without getting up, it
can escalate.

Or, get a pet which expects to be fed in the morning.

~~~
moogatronic
First part of this you can do with the Zeo - They have programming API's that
allow you to use a port on the Zeo for real-time data access. The rest of your
requirements are up to you to provide!

~~~
rdl
Whoa. Thank you so much -- I didn't realize the Zeo could actually talk to
anything in real time.

I've done most of the other parts several times; maybe I should make a
packaged service in January. There are probably plenty of people with macs,
maybe with big TVs attached, in bedrooms, with Internet access; adding the Zeo
and some kind of computer-controlled lighting (optional) isn't much to ask.

Unfortunately having to mess with a serial port is so 1995. I wonder if anyone
will make a simple serial to bluetooth dongle so the whole thing can be done
from an iphone/ipad, or if it will end up with serial to usb to PC.

------
cmos
Making small portable things with long power life can be difficult. Making
money selling small volumes of custom hardware is even more tough.

Why not make a sensor that clip onto your pillow? Then they could be powered
by a wall socket, or at the very least have a large battery once you take the
necessity of size and weight out of the equation.

~~~
cma
Given their history, I wouldn't trust anything from these guys that makes
contact with my skin and plugs into a wall. Hell, I'd be a little worried
about anything from them with a lithium battery, which could cause some major
burns.

------
bostonvaulter2
Has anyone compared this to a Sleep Tracker Pro?

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0026RHFPS/ref=oss_product>

------
jes5199
I think "WakeMate" is a terrible name. Before I read the explanation, I
guessed that it had something to do with wakes, you know, like funerals.

~~~
ericd
I knew what it was instantly from the name, so I'd disagree. It would be an
oddly cheerful name for something that dealt with funeral wakes, so I don't
think many people are likely to jump to that as their first conclusion.

------
joshu
"a wedge of silicon" - does the author not know that the green boards are
fiberglass or whatever?

~~~
fliph
It's not unusual for "silicon" to be used as an all-encompassing term for
computers and computer hardware.

