As someone who occasionally finds it hard to get out of bed, alarm clock technology has always figured heavily on my radar. Traditionally alarm clocks have been utter rubbish but lately a generation of geeks who need to get out of bed have been hard at work on the problem. Often the solution is just to make turning off the alarm harder – whether by making you do a puzzle, or making the clock run away from you.
But these ways have a certain inelegant measure of brute force about them – designed to make waking up a harrassing or annoying experience. So alternative is to make wakefulness the more attractive option than hiding under the duvet – for example by waking you with the smell of tasty, tasty bacon. Though this is obviously not veggie-friendly, and bacon for breakfast every day is not very good for you.
So over at Coolest Gadgets today I was pleased to see one of the, er, coolest ways of waking people up I’ve ever seen, called REMY. Rather than making the user’s sleep patterns fit the clock, it does things the other way round, waking you when it bests suits you. It silently watching over with a biometric scanner. When your body movements show your sleep cycle is lightening, it simulates a gentle sunrise to wake you as nature intended.
Of course there might be a couple of hitches – what if your ideal waking time is 10.30 every day and not a moment before? And also the idea of something constantly watching over you as you sleep may be creepy to some as it is reassuring to others. Still, anything which makes waking up as easy as possible is a great idea to me. More over at Yanko Design and the designer’s Flickr.
