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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Review: Sleep Cycle by Maciek Drejak Labs

Platform: iOs
Cost: $0.99
User Rating: 5/5 (7,789 ratings)
Description & Features (Sleep Analyzer): This app, like Sleep Time, uses the accelerometer in your phone (placed next to your pillow) to correlate body movement to awake periods, and light and deep sleep.  
When I start the sleep period, I can also check triggers on a configurable list that I think may affect my sleep (drank coffee, stressful day) at that time.  The app records during the night and stops when I turn off the alarm (alarm set in a 30 minute window and tries to wake you up in the most optional point during that window).  I record my mood when I wake up on a 3 point face scale (happy, neutral, frown).  After recording 5 nights of data, the device will give you a sleep quality rating (expressed as %), and tells you your Shortest, longest, best, and worst nights.  There are also a set of graphs to view on sleep quality by date and week day, affect on sleep quality (from those triggers I selected), time in bed and time went to bed.
Pros: Turning your phone on its side goes from single night view to cumulative graphs.  Once you figure out that it works this way, it's a nice way to transition without adding an extra button on the main screen.  The pop-up triggers list is also easy for data input.  
I like the 3-scale rating of how I feel when I wake up - it's an intuitive rating, though the app doesn't do anything with this information.
Cons: The graphs look nice and there are a lot of them, but I don't know how much I learn from it.  I have no idea if my sleep graph is "normal" or how it decides what my sleep quality is.  I can send myself a snapshot of a single night's sleep graph, but i can't export any of the graphs.  The data export to a spreadsheet does not open properly.
Takeaway: Multiple views of the same information, but it still doesn't tell me much.  Pop-up triggers and wake-up mood inputs are intuitive and quick for user input, we may think about using something similar with pain levels or sleep quality.  



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