As a true night owl sleep is something that I find hard to commit too especially when there are so many other things I could be doing (writing for TheUnlockr, browsing the web, laundry etc). Sadly it seems as though when I finally do catch a nice wave of slumber the sound of my obnoxious alarm clock is already waking me back to reality. Now that I’ve decided to try to squeeze in ridiculously early am workouts into my life, knowing my sleep cycle and finding a better alarm clock seemed to be the logical thing to do.
Luckily I found the Sleep as Android app, or formerly known as Sleep As An Droid. This app offers a robust alarm clock and an extremely useful sleep tracker. This app is perfect for data lovers who enjoy seeing everything in a visual format.
Pros:
- UI is sleek and well designed, easy to navigate
- Robust alarm clock
- Sleep Tracker
- Tracks movements in the night and plots them on a graph
- Can set alarm to wake you during a light period of sleep
- Rate your sleep on a five-star scale
- Can measure quality of sleep
- Set music to wake you up
- App notifies you when it’s time to go to sleep
- You can set an ideal sleep range
- Visualize your cumulative sleep debt
- App is free
Cons:
How it works:
Sleep as Android is both an alarm clock and an efficient sleep tracker. Each night, before you go to sleep, you set the app into a mode that reads from your device’s gyroscope. Then lay your device on your bed and get to snoring.
The app will then track your physical movements throughout the night and plot these movements on a graph for you to look at the next morning. The graph illustrates periods of inactive movement (deep sleep or rapid-eye-movement cycles) and periods of active moments. The app allows you to configure your alarm within a period of light sleep, in essence making it easier to wake up. After you’ve successfully woken up, the app asks you rate your night’s sleep based on a five-star scale. You can also add comments if you want too.
Conclusion:
Sleep as Android has been a practical and helpful app in my obnoxiously active life. Once I decided to give sleep a priority I set out to fight the right app to help me track my sleep which would in turn hopefully lead me to better quality sleep. After using the app for a month now, I can visualize a comparison of nights across a specific period of time. I am able to measure exactly how much sleep I’ve gotten and set my ideal sleep range within the app’s settings. I am able to monitor what my cumulative sleep debt is and now if I need to hit the sack a little early I know I only stand to benefit from a few extra hours the next day.
Sleep as Android is available for free in the Google Play Store. Requires Android 1.5 and higher.
Play LinkThis is part of our Android App of the Day series. We take our favorite app for Android for each day and post it here for you to check out. Feel free to check out all of our App of the Day posts here.
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