REVIEW: Sleeptracker Pro Elite

The Sleeptracker Pro Elite wrist watch is a clever little sleep aid, but relies on creative technology—rather than an intravenous feed of Lunesta—to work its magic. It can mitigate the unpleasantness of a groggy wake-up, as well as provide accurate data on your sleep patterns so you can monitor how caffeine, exercise, and other lifestyle choices affect your slumber. At the heart of the system is an accelerometer that tracks your most subtle night-time movements, all in the service of determining the frequency and timing of your “almost-awake” moments.
Here’s the deal: Your body cycles through various sleep states while you snooze. Periods of deep, regenerative sleep (aka “delta sleep”) are interrupted by periods of near-wakefulness and rapid eye movement (aka REM sleep, which is when we have all our dreams). Too many almost-awake moments indicate a poor night’s sleep, but, paradoxically, Sleeptracker uses these restless periods to gently ease you out of slumber.

She's not a looker, but who cares once you're asleep?
Let’s say you want to wake at 7:30 am. You set the watch’s alarm to that time, and define an alarm “window” of, say, 25 minutes. The watch uses its accelerometer to detect body movement, and when it senses this indicator of near-wakefulness during your alarm window, it gently rouses you with either a gentle vibration and/or a rapid beeping sound. This means that if you enter an almost-awake state at 7:05 a.m., the alarm will trigger. And if you don’t enter an almost-awake state at all, the alarm will simply go off at 7:30 a.m.
The system works. During a week’s worth of testing, the Sleeptracker performed as advertised, gently nudging me awake within minutes of my alarm target. In fact, when the watch vibrates against your wrist during an almost-awake moment, you don’t even feel like you’re waking up. It’s more like flipping a switch from near-lucidity to complete wakefulness, and you emerge relatively refreshed without feeling like someone slipped you a roofie.
Besides sensing almost-awake moments, the watch also tracks them, providing a log of exactly when they occurred. If you’re lucky, you’ll see eight hours of sleep with a relatively small number of almost-awake moments. The watch also calculates the average interval between all your almost-awake moments (a shorter average interval indicates a more fitful night of sleep). With this data, you can hunt for patterns, linking daytime activities to nighttime successes or failures.
Quibbles: The display’s AM, PM, and vibration mode icons are nestled at the very top of the screen, where they’re hard to see, obscured by shadows and reflections. Also, the crystal scratches quite easily. We also wish the watch’s backlight lasted for more than five seconds when pressed. Finally, the watch’s UI isn’t intuitive, so studying the manual is imperative.
Interestingly, the user’s manual includes a curious caution: “Sleeptracker should not be used to deprive yourself of a full night’s sleep.” That’s too bad, because we can see the operating system being hacked to wake us during all our almost-awake moments—so we could jot down our dreams right after they occur. This system hack could also help stave off the advances of Freddy Krueger.