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.