Alarm Clocks by brain wave monitoring, oh and nightmare interruption!

Waking up in the morning is generally pretty difficult despite a wide variety of alarm clocks and aids that try to make it a bit easier.  My wife and I recently purchased this Homemedic alarm clock that simulates sunrise and sunset with a timed auto dimming and auto brightening of the room. The idea is that our bodies are attuned to the cues of sunrise and sunset and thus respond accordingly.  The sunset feature is really nice, and in the winters, the sunrise feature is alright, but I think fundamentally we have taken the wrong approach.  As long as we are trying to force the body to wake up (or sleep) when it doesn't want to, a battle will ensue.  The only way to truly ease out of bed is by listening to our bodies and waking up when it is ready.

Now most people probably can't make the time to sleep as long our bodies would have it, who really has the 8-10 hours a day to sleep? But that doesn't mean we're doomed because there is no direct correlation to hours of sleep and feeling refreshed.  Research has indicated that the key to feeling refreshed is waking up in the correct part of our sleep cycles. (Here's an interesting post by Glen Rhodes who's done some research and provides sources.  Also see wikipedia)  Summarized, our bodies apparently sleep in 90 minute cycles.  When we wake up in the middle of a cycle we feel very sleepy but if we wake up at the end of a cycle we're usually ready to go.  By forcing a schedule on our bodies we pretty much guarantee to always wake up in the middle of a cycle.  Instead, we should schedule our sleep around our bodies where we could potentially sleep less but feel more rested.

The Product:

What I would like is a simple brain wave monitoring alarm clock system.  It monitors my sleep patterns and learns my body's sleep habits.  When I go to bed I set an alarm for the drop-dead time which I want to be up by.  Then the alarm clock monitors my sleep and wakes me up at the end of the last full cycle before I have to get up.  Let's say I need to be up by 6:30AM but my sleep cycle ends at 6:00AM, I have a choice, do I sleep an extra 30 minutes which is going to make me feel more tired, or do I get up then feeling rested with an extra 30 minutes in my day.   From an efficiency standpoint the latter option makes a lot more sense.

Nightmare Interruption: 

If we are already collecting and monitoring real time EEG data, than detecting a nightmare could be as straightforward as detecting the right patterns. Imagine if the alarm clock could actually monitor your brain waves and detect what is about to become a bad dream and intervene by giving warning.  That has pretty significant value especially to people that suffer from night terrors.  In fact this project is starting to sound a lot like an epilepsy detection device that a friend of mine at Nuerovista works on.

For now:
As Apple would claim, there is an app for that.  It covers the alarm clock function by using the phone's accelerometers to monitor your movements in bed.  I think this is cool, but I doubt an iphone can truly do this effectively.  (I would be curious if anyone has tried it though)  Also nightmare interruption is probably not feasible to deduce from sleep movements as the average user will have nearly zero tolerance for false positives. So for now, we'll just have to try and time our cycles manually.

Smart Money

Financially our lives could be improved by technology.  Great things have already started to happen... (pointing at Yodlee, Mint, TurboTax, online banking + bill pay)  but the best has yet to come.  The truth is the average person doesn't like thinking about money, and why should we? For most people money is just an obstacle between us and what we would rather be doing with our lives.  Now although I can't solve any of this, I do have an idea:  let's let our computers handle it all for us.

The average person's cash flow can be a lot more automated using infrastructure that we already have in place.  Budgeting today shouldn't take any more than a self-analyzing bank account.  My bank account has all of my information, in fact it knows more than me.  (Consider all of those purchases that I've forgotten or last-call bar tabs that I signed too drunk to remember.)  My bank account knows all about them, in fact it knows to the exact penny.   It knows how much I'm paid every month and it knows exactly when those paychecks arrive.  It knows how much my mortgage or rent is and how much my bills should be on average.  And If my bank account teamed up with my credit card than it would also know on average how much I spend a week and where that money is going.

So if I'd rather not worry about money, paying bills, and trying to keep track of where all my money is going, than let me just assign all of that work to my computers.  (After all isn't that what they are for)  Here's some example dialogue I would have with my computer.

"Computer listen up, pay my mortgage and my bills every month, put $300 bucks from my paycheck into savings and keep the rest for me to spend.  Oh also when you are paying my bills, if you see anything higher than it should be, like say if Comcast is trying to screw me, please let me know. Otherwise I don't care, just make sure everything is paid on time."

Well that's easy, with the exception of making sure Comcast isn't screwing me, my online banking and yodlee can already do all this, but there's more that I want.

"Hey Computer, I also want you to keep track of my budget. Figure out how much discretionary spending money I have each month.  Then keep track of all of my expenses and let me know when I'm about to run out of money for that month.  Computer, when I'm at Fry's trying to justify my next big purchase, I'm relying on you to give me an exact figure of how much discretionary spending I have left for that month.  And oh yeah, Computer, I don't want to spend more than 5 minutes a month answering any questions you might have.  So [in the voice of my high school's baseball coach] Figure it out!"

My hypothesis is this, people would like to be responsible with their money, and they would be if it was easy to do so.  Budgeting and tracking today is still a pain, so instead people resort to estimates (which tend to be optimistic) or just choose to ignore money altogether.  In both cases, the trend is to spend first and account later which in my opinion explains our society's love for credit cards, consumerism and low savings rate.  If we all had live-updated budgets that were readily available on our phones, making the right decision would be easy.  The best part is that my bank already has all of my information so they could roll something out like this tomorrow and it wouldn't require me, the lazy American, to do anything.

This is the information age, so give us the information.

Technology hasn't completely failed me...

Ok, so technology hasn't completely failed me, after all I am using this tekmology called a blog. :)
 
The truth is I like to consider myself a techy which explains my love and fascination for all gadgets and gizmos.  But despite all of the amazing innovation we've seen over my lifetime I can't help but want even more.

To me, technology's has only two purposes, it either makes our lives easier or increases the enjoyment we get from our lives.  With that in mind, I see many places where large value can be derived from small extensions or new applications of what already exists today.  (Low hanging fruit if you will, I'm no visionary, I'm just trying to connect the dots)

This blog will serve as my wishlist for new technology that I'd like to have.  It'll likely be vague, I'm not pitching any designs or solutions.   I aim to mostly present the ideas I dream up or the problems I'd like solved. For all you developers, designers, engineers and geeks with more free time and know-how than me, start hacking away and build me something really cool.


Or just feel free to comment or drop links to anything that I might want to know about.