Sleep Cycle

When we sleep, our sleep goes through different phases, depending on the electrical activity of brain waves. Specifically, there are 5 stages we go through in our sleep. In the deep sleep stage is when we rest the most, both physically and mentally, and in the REM phase is when we are most 'active' and dreams are shown in a more vivid way. A complete and restful sleep would consist of 5 complete cycles of 5 stages, having to wake up at the end of the REM phase (the last one) or at the beginning of the restart of the cycles.But of course, when do we know what cycle we are in to wake up better and not feel tired the rest of the day?

Wake up energized thanks to Sleep Cycle

That is precisely what the Android application Sleep Cycle offers, a smart alarm clock that tracks your sleep cycles and wakes you up when you have entered a light sleep phase, depending on the time zone in which you have set the alarm clock in the application. You can download it from the Google Play application store, it is free, although to unlock all the functions we will have to go through the box monthly, and its installation file has a weight of 31 MB.

Perhaps you are wondering how the application detects that you have entered one phase or another.Well, although the tool obviously does not have a solid scientific basis, it may be able to detect such a phase by recording your movements and breathing That is why , when you open the app for the first time, it asks you to have access to the microphone and that, for it to work properly, you must place your phone near where you sleep, for example, on your nightstand.

Once you have given permission to the application to listen to you, you must set the time zone in which you want to wake up. Within this half-hour time frame, the app will detect when you have left REM and then wake you up. Once the alarm starts ringing, if you want to delay it, double-tap the phone or pick it up with your hand. It is also important that you place the phone with the screen facing up.

On the main screen and before setting the sleep interval in which we want to wake up we can see, at the bottom of it, four different iconsthrough which we will access different Sleep Cycle screens. The first is in which the user places the interval in which he wants to wake up. The next screen is exclusively reserved for people who pay for premium access and consists of a graph of sleep trends over the days. On the last screen we find the general configuration of the application, in which we can choose the alarm melody, decide whether to also use the vibration as part of the alarm, configure the time interval, which, by default, is half an hour, etc. .

Among the features that we can find for free in the Sleep Cycle application are:

• -A detailed sleep analysis with proprietary sound technology and the application's accelerometer
• -Sleep statistics and daily sleep graphs
• -Different alarm melodies, all of them soft and that will wake you up smoothly
• -Customizable wake-up interval from half an hour to half an hour

If you want more functions such as long-term statistics, trends in your snoring, sleep notes, etc., you will have to pay an amount of 30 euros per year , 2.5 euros per month in 12 installments.