Will you Sleep Better with a $400 Alarm Clock?

By Morgan Mayhew on September 29, 2009

Home sleep evaluation is truly an emerging market. The vast majority of Americans have no idea what their sleep patterns are and don't understand the importance of sleep cycles and how they affect your day.
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A new product, the Zeo personal sleep coach is a step in the right direction to give the slumbering masses more control of their night. But that control comes at a jaw-dropping price of $399.

Another product that comes in the form of a wristwatch, SleepTracker Pro, essentially completes the similar task for $179.

So what is the task? While it's great to understand your sleep patterns: light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep, getting your hands on that data alone doesn't help unless you can put it to use.

What Zeo does is help you find the optimal time to wakeup, which is when you're transitioning to or from a REM state. Zeo monitors your sleep phases and wakes you up within your wake up range when you're either entering or transitioning out of a REM phase.

Have you ever awoke at 4 a.m. for no good reason and felt wide-awake and great? With a device like Zeo, you can make that happen. But is it worth the $400 price tag?

A piece of software for Macs, Dream Catcher, used to exist for around $70 and did Zeo's task plus much more – and did it better.

Dream Catcher was an application installed on a Mac laptop that you would place next to your bedside and it would use the computer's camera and microphone to monitor, and record your sleep. Not only would it wake you at the optimal time and chart beautiful graphs and email them to you, it would actually take a time lapse video of you tossing in turning throughout the night – creepy but effective. As a final handy touch, it would monitor your snoring and report he number of snores each night. It could record your snoring or just record any sounds at night such as a you sleep-screaming at your boss.

If you coupled Dream Catcher with a camcorder with night vision (existing on almost all camcorders) you had an extremely effective sleep tool

It was innovative software but a bit buggy. Even worse, it was created by a flaky Frenchman who let he application die.

So today, we're left with products like Zeo or Sleeptracker pro that capture motion data rather than recording it through imaging. In the case of Zeo, you have to wear a not-so-cool headband throughout the night. Reports have yet to come in of Zeo users having first-person Rambo dreams due to black headband use.

If productivity is your thing, then you may want to drop $400 on Zeo. Why? Because you can give Polyphasic sleep a try.

Polyphasic Sleep, also known as the Da Vinci Sleep Cycle, involves reclaiming three to four more hours out of your day by sleeping only for about four hours a night coupled with a few 20 minute naps. With a tool like Zeo, you can get in two REM cycles (four hours), wake up, and feel great.

Also, if you want nightly, vivid dreams of being Rambo, then Zeo is the product for you.

Product Link: MyZeo