Congrats to The Wakemate team for finally shipping! The device is pretty awesome,(I've been using during the beta) can't wait to see what these guys have in store next.
I've been using the beta product for some time now. Have to say when I got it became totally worth it just to monitor my sleep.
The tagging system while sort of awkward to do right before you sleep, lets you categorize everything over time and see how things like a cough, sleeping on the couch instead of the bed or even a broken AC affects your sleep.
The price is dirt cheap for something this interesting. Get it!
I was one of the beta-testers of the WakeMate, so it's been a part of my life for about a month now. Prior to using the WakeMate, I had two choices regarding sleep: establishing a strict routine by retiring at midnight every night and waking up at 7:30 on the dot, or keeping other hours and feeling groggy all day regardless of the total amount of sleep. Since I have friends and an unpredictable work schedule, I've never been able to stick to fixed sleeping patterns for a prolonged period of time. With the WakeMate I still need about 7 hours of sleep each night, however, I can take those 7 hours whenever it is convenient for me, and wake up feeling about as great as I ever feel in the morning.
The WakeMate costs as much as a week of coffee from a café – try it out.
When you're on a regular schedule, your body gets in a rhythm where you'll usually end up waking up at the exact same minute every day, even without an alarm.
When you don't maintain a regular schedule (or you're in sleep debt), your body can't do that. So your alarm may start buzzing in the middle of "deep" sleep, and you get stuck with sleep inertia.
Smart alarms like this try to compromise by waking you up in "light" sleep, or ideally in moments of wakefulness that you'd otherwise pass up and go back to sleep.
WakeMate uses a science called actigraphy to monitor your sleep patterns by measuring the movement of your body (via your wrist). Actigraphy has been used in sleep labs for decades and is a widely standardized metric of sleep in humans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actigraphy). The Sleep Cycle app, because it is not attached to your body, does not use actigraphy, and therefore cannot provide the same granular level of data measurement as a device using actigraphy, such as the WakeMate. Furthermore, Sleep Cycle is susceptible to false data collection since it can be easily influenced by the presence of others in the bed, such as a partner or pet.
If you're willing to attach an iOS device to your body while you sleep (between two socks works great, or with an armband) you can try an actigraphy-accurate smart alarm with my app:
For Sleep Cycle, you just leave the phone on the mattress so you can charge at the same time. For something like Circadian Alarm you need to plug in for 20 mins before bed to get enough juice for the night.
1. Can anyone compare WakeMakes with that clock thing that tracks your eye movement by wearing an eyemask? The name of the clock escapes me at the moment, will edit this post once I remember.
edit: it's called Zeo
2. If I know I wake up at least once a night to use the bahtroom out of habit does this disrupt the wake-up system in any way?
Nice thanks. Might I suggest you make the compare chart more accessible. Even now knowing it exists I took another pass through the site to see how I overlooked it and I still can't figure out how to navigate to it.
edit: Finally found it as the LAST item on the FAQ. I still think you should make it more accesible! Cool
I've been using WakeMate in beta for a couple months. As an engineer, I love checking the sleep analytics and comparing tags to try to determine factors that affect my sleep.
At first I was dubious that I'd be less groggy when waking up with the device, but now I'm absolutely convinced. I even bring the WakeMate when I travel, to ensure I wake up in a fresher state (which also revealed to me that my sleep quality is better from hotels).
I loved sleep activity graphs in Brain&Behavior bio in college, wish I had heard about this earlier.
Also, have you identified anything that benefits your sleep schedule? The site hints at things like exercise to benefit and alcohol to disrupt, but do you have any anecdotes for me?
And one more: Can you identify different phases of sleep on your nightly graph?
You can identify different phases of sleep (REM, etc.)
And the tagging is indeed the sweetest thing IMO, but you probably need a lot of the data before making a good conclusions. I found that I actually sleep really well when I'm sick or when I'm sleeping on the left side of the bed. Weird stuff like that.
I add tags before I go to bed. Based on these, my sleep score is highest when I go to bed stressed, tired (duh), have a snack in the evening, or sleep in a hotel. It's lowest when I go to bed early, fall asleep hungry, or go to bed with my wife (huh?)
Does the iPhone app needs to be running through the night for this device to work? that's what I hated about Sleep Cycle and would not want to use it if it has the same flaw.
Why do you hate that? You wouldn't be using your phone during the night anyway?
If you want the optimal wake feature to work you need to leave the app running. If you just want to collect data and wake up at a predetermined time you can background the app. Unfortunately this is a limitation imposed by iOS.
> Why do you hate that? You wouldn't be using your phone during the night anyway?
I can't answer for the original poster, but for me...
At night is when I charge my phone and there isn't always a plug near where I sleep.
Having my phone have to run at night without a charge will mean it's not fully charged at the beginning of the day, which is a very big deal breaker for me. My phone will last the entire day, but only if it's fully charged when I get up in the morning.
yeah. I have exactly the same reason. I had to connect iPhone to charger through the night and leave the app on, so it was emitting light. Another big reason is that using iPhone alarm I can just set it very easily. With SleepCycle I had to connect iPhone to power plug, open SleepCycle app, make sure the light does not interfere with my sleep etc..
So with Wakemate, if it could run in the background with no need to be plugged in and screen shut down , relying on notification, that would be a great improvement.
> Why do you hate that? You wouldn't be using your phone during the night anyway?
I wanted to chime in on this. I may not use my phone at night, but it is certainly receiving notifications and SMS messages throughout the night. This means that with any iPhone alarm, I have to go through numerous close dialogs just to get to my alarm in order to turn it off. A minor annoyance, but the wrist band helps. Otherwise, I'd have to go through my settings and disable notifications prior to going to sleep so as not to disturb me. <-- Heavy sleeper
I love the notion of Wakemate and even had some conversations with them early on. Unfortunately, my current financial situation puts it about $30 out of my range.
Best of luck guys! As soon as the $30 in my wallet moves up to $60, I'll be on board.
Your website needs to have a one sentence explanation of what it does, e.g. measure sleep and wake you up when you're in a light sleep. You pretty much have to read the FAQ to figure out that's what it does. Not saying this makes it seem like a quack magnetic bracelet or something. Just a suggestion.
We made the assumption that the average purchaser would not be interested in details like what phase of sleep you are woken up in. That is why those details are provided, but not prominently displayed.
The average purchaser is probably not interested in the details, but they are most certainly interested in a sentence describing what it does.
All that I knew about it when I clicked the link and skimmed the page was:
- They're ready
- I skipped some stuff about pre-orders
- I might not be able to get one before Christmas
- When you make them, they're all arranged in a big tray, are charcoal and light blue
- The manufacturing process somehow involves baking and cutting.
I had to click in my url bar and type in "wakemate.com" before I got anything useful. It's a fuzzy bracelet, it has something to do with waking you up and making you feel better, a few platforms like iPhone, some video I don't have time for, and I finally read "Wake up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle."
Hey Wakemate team... I haven't got an email from you since April 1st (amusing with the first line "WakeMate's are shipping"). What's the deal?
International pre-order, I sent paid my paypal deposit on 24/nov/2009, the refund came through -- but I'm not getting any emails. (Doesn't seem to be in gmail spam either)
I've never looked into WakeMate before as sleeping is one thing I can do really well, but I thought it shipped earlier this year? I only see one product listed, is this really new?
The problem might not be strictly shipping related.
Depending on the type of bluetooth radio packaged internally, the device may have needed FCC-type registration. Of course, an FCC ID is only good in the USA. In Europe, you need a CE mark. Australia sometimes insists on yet another registration for 2.4GHz equipment.
Honestly, international RF regulatory certification is a mess, and the piles of paperwork involved make it easy to miss deadlines.
Do you assume that their might be any problem with customs (e.g., due to the CE marks) when importing those devices to Europe? If not I'm considering using Borderlinx (https://www.borderlinx.com/) to import the device.
If you guys haven't already got a relationship with TÜV, you might consider talking to them about certifying your next revision. They handled all our regulatory (domestic and int'l) with a lot less difficulty (and deadline slipping) than doing it in-house.
Yeah, I made the mistake of actually getting a bit excited again when seeing the progress reports these past weeks. The wording in this blog post and my gut feeling after a year of waiting is that shipping internationally will be very low on the WakeMate to-do list. I wish they'd just tell us up front though.
Any users with small children care to share your experiences? Is it even worth the bother, given that huge uncontrollable variable in your sleep habits?
I was kind of curious about this, too. If I wake up in the middle of the night to deal with a sick toddler, will WakeMate know I'm fully awake based on the fact that I'm walking around? I suppose it would be much like waking up to go to the bathroom, for those without young kids.
Obviously the alarm's only going to help if I set it for a window I know is before the kids wake up. Otherwise it's their voices that'll wake me. On work days, that would suit my usual routine. On the weekend, I'm not sure it would be worth it to forego a potential extra hour of sleep by setting the WakeMate alarm.
But it's still tempting, just to chart my sleep during the week and be able to measure the effects of caffeine, exercise, etc. I'll probably wait until there are reviews and testimonials from people who have used it for a few months.
I was tempted a couple years ago by a much more expensive product whose name I can't recall. I think it was $300-400. In contrast, it's pretty easy to take a chance on $60. Cool product, guys. I hope you're wildly successful.
FYI, the following repeats under your FAQ question "What is an 'optimal wake point?'"
An optimal wake moment can be thought of as a "semi-awake" moment – the lightest point in your sleep. Waking at these times will result in minimal sleep inertia or grogginess. More info can be found here: The Science of Waking
That's putting a lot of stock into the device itself.
Conjecture: I think it's more likely that the device is something of an accelerometer paired with a bluetooth radio that can nearly continuously feed the phone/app with movement data so that the app can decide whether or not to rouse you.
Rationale: The algorithm. Assuming they want to tweak their actigraphy parameters, if the algorithm is running on the wristband you're going to need to drop new firmware on the device. Field-flashing embedded devices is to be avoided at all reasonable costs.
So, again, I don't know anything about the device in question, so this is all conjecture... but:
Even given that OTA flashing is possible, why bother? The device has no means of waking the user without a phone in bluetooth range, so what's the upshot? I don't know that battery life falls into that category because the device would need some pretty serious upgrades, and cost would obviously increase:
- More RAM. Lots more. Enough to contain an entire firmware image during OTA and an entire night of sleep/movement history.
- More MIPS. Actigraphy isn't going to be as cheap as store-and-forward.
- A reliable RTC so that the device can ping the phone at the right wakeup time.
- etc.
If I was in their position, I'd build the device to be as dumb a peripheral as possible. Push the complexity out of expensive hardware and into software. I'd also probably have built in a sweet inductive charging pad, too, but I'm a sucker for shiny things.
Does the FAQ mean to have collapsing text chunks? I see the arrows, and they point right -> down -> right if I click them, but nothing happens. Everything is always expanded.
After quitting coffee, waking up became easy for me.
This feels like an over-engineered solution to a problem that's easy to fix: switch to decaf. There's a reason you feel horrible in the morning, and it's not because of "sleep inertia!"
My caffeine intake is basically nil, but I still often feel drowsy when I wake up, especially from an alarm. It's usually when I haven't sleept enough, but sometimes if I've been sleeping roughly enough, waking up from my alarm leaves me very drowsy.
Sleep is very complicated. Just because dumping caffeine fixed your drowsiness doesn't mean it'll fix everyone's.
Maybe my comment came off too strong, but I'd not be surprised (especially given the audience for the WakeMate) if a majority of WakeMate users have a daily intake of caffeine adversely affecting their sleep cycle.
Another way to put it is this is premature optimization for those folks.
I don't drink coffee. I don't drink tea. I don't drink soda. I consume 0 caffeine and as a student I get my energy from good sleep. However, I've realized that more sleep does not necessarily mean I wake up refreshed. I've self observed with myself that if one day I sleep 7 hours or 8 or 5 and feel well rested and then I try to repeat that, I don't produce the same results. This is an excellent product that addresses this sleep issue and your comments are really not justified.
Exactly. I'm in the middle of trying to let my wrists heal from RSI, and I've noticed that my sleep quality isn't consistently good. Deep sleep seems necessary for healing to occur. I'm looking for something that will let me try out different sleep tweaks (less ambient lighting/no caffeine at all/exercise in morning/exercise in afternoon/various diets) and see which ones are actually effective for me.
Hopefully Wakemate fits the bill. I'll wait for the initial reviews to come out. I'm excited about the future of health afforded by devices like these.
I quit caffeine about a month ago as an experiment, and noted no real change in my sleep. I was drinking about a pot of coffee a day on average, plus sodas at lunchtime.
Incidentally I found the withdrawal symptoms to be nearly nil. I had some mild headaches for a few days, and that was about it.
Congrats on shipping on a hardware product! The product seems great.
A couple of questions...
The site says the product is scientific. But the first paper I found after a bit of digging points to the use of Actigraphy which seems to be just a method of collecting data (even though you say it is a "clinically proven science").
The second pdf containing the excerpts does not answer the following questions.
The questions
1. Is waking up at the optimal time (light sleep before alarm) shown to reduce daytime grogginess rather than just wake-time grogginess?
2. Is the continued waking up at the optimal time free of any adverse effects in the long run ?
I did some googling to find answers to the above, but couldn't find anything layman readable or substantial. If I have to pay $60 for a product, it is really a pain to do the research myself.
Some excerpts
"subjects were presented a word list 1 min after arousal from different sleep stage ..."
"The most important finding from this study is that sleep inertia reduces decision‐making performance for at least 30 min."
If it makes me feel good just after waking up for an hour or so, then is it really that useful?
"If it makes me feel good just after waking up for an hour or so, then is it really that useful?"
If I retain my daytime alertness, I think so :) Morning grogginess is pretty much the worst part of my day and I think $60 to make it go away is a pretty good deal.
1. The optimal wake feature reduces daytime grogginess only in the sense that it puts you in a better mood in the morning. Attacking daytime grogginess is something we address with the analytics portion of our product.
2. Yes it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. You are just waking a little bit earlier at a point where your body feels more inclined to wake up.
Your last question:
The optimal wake portion of our product is addressed towards people who don't particularly like waking up in the morning. If that isn't you then no, it probably isn't that useful.
The other part of our product, the analytics portion, is addressed to those who want to improve their sleep quality so they can feel better rested throughout the day. It sounds like that is more what you are looking for.
tl;dr The WakeMate wakes you up at the optimal time so you feel refreshed and provides sleep analytics so you can maintain that fully rested feeling throughout the day.
Your answer to the second question should show a little less certainty unless you have a study to link to. I think the original commenter gets that you're just waking up a little earlier, but consistently doing that every day isn't natural. Sure, neither are alarm clocks in general, but there are probably studies about those. This is a special case of alarm clock that could, in theory, have different long-term effects.
There are probably legal issues with your claim as well. I'd just say that it's very unlikely to have adverse effects instead of "it is completely free of adverse affects".
I agree that it is not a good idea to make blanket statements. I have edited my original comment.
The WakeMate wakes you similarly to how you would wake if you did not set an alarm. That is why it is very unlikely to have adverse effects.
Regarding your comment: "I think the original commenter gets that you're just waking up a little earlier, but consistently doing that every day isn't natural."
It may just be because I'm familiar with the product but it doesn't seem to me that setting your alarm for 9:00am and waking at 8:55am can be construed as unnatural.
If the product works really, really well and users end up waking up at the optimal time the vast majority of the time, that may (or may not) be different from the conditions in which we evolved and the various adaptations we've made since then that are better studied. It could have some sort of adverse effect. It's very unlikely.
I disagree. He makes two unsupported claims that reek of cargo-culting:
"1. The optimal wake feature reduces daytime grogginess only in the sense that it puts you in a better mood in the morning.
2. Yes it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. You are just waking a little bit earlier at a point where your body feels more inclined to wake up."
Two claims. No data from either published literature (from other studies) or their own data. How do they even know it works? Why should we treat it any differently than claims of magnets improving your sleep? A free pass shouldn't be granted just because they are YC.
Sleep scientist here. Actigrams based on 3way accelerometers are very common to measure sleep in a very non invasive way and they give a resolution good enough for having an idea of sleep amount and even roughly sleep pattern. I have no idea how well wakemate works, I would love to try of course (wink).
132 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadThe tagging system while sort of awkward to do right before you sleep, lets you categorize everything over time and see how things like a cough, sleeping on the couch instead of the bed or even a broken AC affects your sleep.
The price is dirt cheap for something this interesting. Get it!
The WakeMate costs as much as a week of coffee from a café – try it out.
When you don't maintain a regular schedule (or you're in sleep debt), your body can't do that. So your alarm may start buzzing in the middle of "deep" sleep, and you get stuck with sleep inertia.
Smart alarms like this try to compromise by waking you up in "light" sleep, or ideally in moments of wakefulness that you'd otherwise pass up and go back to sleep.
(If you're not familiar with the concept of sleep cycles: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_s...)
I currently use the Sleep Cycle app, which uses the iPhone's accelerometer to detect motion while asleep.
How does WakeMate stack up against that app?
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian-alarm/id330721657?m...
It's a dollar in the store but email me at michael at programmablelife dot com and I'll give you a coupon so you don't have to pay.
Any ETA on international pre-orders (I'm UK based), notice I haven't received an email asking me to pay yet.
1. Can anyone compare WakeMakes with that clock thing that tracks your eye movement by wearing an eyemask? The name of the clock escapes me at the moment, will edit this post once I remember.
edit: it's called Zeo
2. If I know I wake up at least once a night to use the bahtroom out of habit does this disrupt the wake-up system in any way?
WakeMate is cheaper, more comfortable, and easier to use.
Getting up in the middle of the night won't affect anything. Our analytics system will, however, tell you that you woke up during the night.
edit: Finally found it as the LAST item on the FAQ. I still think you should make it more accesible! Cool
can you link us to the paper you use to determine optimal wakeup time? or do you just use it on analytics based on user-generated reports.
At first I was dubious that I'd be less groggy when waking up with the device, but now I'm absolutely convinced. I even bring the WakeMate when I travel, to ensure I wake up in a fresher state (which also revealed to me that my sleep quality is better from hotels).
I loved sleep activity graphs in Brain&Behavior bio in college, wish I had heard about this earlier.
Also, have you identified anything that benefits your sleep schedule? The site hints at things like exercise to benefit and alcohol to disrupt, but do you have any anecdotes for me?
And one more: Can you identify different phases of sleep on your nightly graph?
Thanks!
You can identify different phases of sleep (REM, etc.)
And the tagging is indeed the sweetest thing IMO, but you probably need a lot of the data before making a good conclusions. I found that I actually sleep really well when I'm sick or when I'm sleeping on the left side of the bed. Weird stuff like that.
If you want the optimal wake feature to work you need to leave the app running. If you just want to collect data and wake up at a predetermined time you can background the app. Unfortunately this is a limitation imposed by iOS.
I can't answer for the original poster, but for me...
At night is when I charge my phone and there isn't always a plug near where I sleep.
Having my phone have to run at night without a charge will mean it's not fully charged at the beginning of the day, which is a very big deal breaker for me. My phone will last the entire day, but only if it's fully charged when I get up in the morning.
As a person who pre-ordered the phone, that is appreciated very much:)
So with Wakemate, if it could run in the background with no need to be plugged in and screen shut down , relying on notification, that would be a great improvement.
I wanted to chime in on this. I may not use my phone at night, but it is certainly receiving notifications and SMS messages throughout the night. This means that with any iPhone alarm, I have to go through numerous close dialogs just to get to my alarm in order to turn it off. A minor annoyance, but the wrist band helps. Otherwise, I'd have to go through my settings and disable notifications prior to going to sleep so as not to disturb me. <-- Heavy sleeper
Another flaw I would think is the potential risk of radiation of having it on you all night.
Best of luck guys! As soon as the $30 in my wallet moves up to $60, I'll be on board.
Thank you for your suggestion though.
All that I knew about it when I clicked the link and skimmed the page was: - They're ready - I skipped some stuff about pre-orders - I might not be able to get one before Christmas - When you make them, they're all arranged in a big tray, are charcoal and light blue - The manufacturing process somehow involves baking and cutting.
I had to click in my url bar and type in "wakemate.com" before I got anything useful. It's a fuzzy bracelet, it has something to do with waking you up and making you feel better, a few platforms like iPhone, some video I don't have time for, and I finally read "Wake up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle."
That sentence should be the first thing I read.
International pre-order, I sent paid my paypal deposit on 24/nov/2009, the refund came through -- but I'm not getting any emails. (Doesn't seem to be in gmail spam either)
Addendum: I'm totally still buying it.
It's a bit disappointing about the international shipping. I'm not sure how this snuck up on them so late in the game.
Shouldn't this have been foreseeable? What happened to cause this mistake?
Depending on the type of bluetooth radio packaged internally, the device may have needed FCC-type registration. Of course, an FCC ID is only good in the USA. In Europe, you need a CE mark. Australia sometimes insists on yet another registration for 2.4GHz equipment.
Honestly, international RF regulatory certification is a mess, and the piles of paperwork involved make it easy to miss deadlines.
Regardless, I'm glad they're finally shipping (for real this time?). I hope it is worth the wait.
Obviously the alarm's only going to help if I set it for a window I know is before the kids wake up. Otherwise it's their voices that'll wake me. On work days, that would suit my usual routine. On the weekend, I'm not sure it would be worth it to forego a potential extra hour of sleep by setting the WakeMate alarm.
But it's still tempting, just to chart my sleep during the week and be able to measure the effects of caffeine, exercise, etc. I'll probably wait until there are reviews and testimonials from people who have used it for a few months.
I was tempted a couple years ago by a much more expensive product whose name I can't recall. I think it was $300-400. In contrast, it's pretty easy to take a chance on $60. Cool product, guys. I hope you're wildly successful.
An optimal wake moment can be thought of as a "semi-awake" moment – the lightest point in your sleep. Waking at these times will result in minimal sleep inertia or grogginess. More info can be found here: The Science of Waking
1. Is the battery a rechargeable or normal battery that I have to replace?
2. Can I easily download my sleep data to my computer to mess around with?
2. Not yet.
Conjecture: I think it's more likely that the device is something of an accelerometer paired with a bluetooth radio that can nearly continuously feed the phone/app with movement data so that the app can decide whether or not to rouse you.
Rationale: The algorithm. Assuming they want to tweak their actigraphy parameters, if the algorithm is running on the wristband you're going to need to drop new firmware on the device. Field-flashing embedded devices is to be avoided at all reasonable costs.
Even given that OTA flashing is possible, why bother? The device has no means of waking the user without a phone in bluetooth range, so what's the upshot? I don't know that battery life falls into that category because the device would need some pretty serious upgrades, and cost would obviously increase:
- More RAM. Lots more. Enough to contain an entire firmware image during OTA and an entire night of sleep/movement history.
- More MIPS. Actigraphy isn't going to be as cheap as store-and-forward.
- A reliable RTC so that the device can ping the phone at the right wakeup time.
- etc.
If I was in their position, I'd build the device to be as dumb a peripheral as possible. Push the complexity out of expensive hardware and into software. I'd also probably have built in a sweet inductive charging pad, too, but I'm a sucker for shiny things.
Chrome 10.0.612.1 dev
This feels like an over-engineered solution to a problem that's easy to fix: switch to decaf. There's a reason you feel horrible in the morning, and it's not because of "sleep inertia!"
Sleep is very complicated. Just because dumping caffeine fixed your drowsiness doesn't mean it'll fix everyone's.
Another way to put it is this is premature optimization for those folks.
Hopefully Wakemate fits the bill. I'll wait for the initial reviews to come out. I'm excited about the future of health afforded by devices like these.
Incidentally I found the withdrawal symptoms to be nearly nil. I had some mild headaches for a few days, and that was about it.
The questions
1. Is waking up at the optimal time (light sleep before alarm) shown to reduce daytime grogginess rather than just wake-time grogginess?
2. Is the continued waking up at the optimal time free of any adverse effects in the long run ? I did some googling to find answers to the above, but couldn't find anything layman readable or substantial. If I have to pay $60 for a product, it is really a pain to do the research myself.
Some excerpts
"subjects were presented a word list 1 min after arousal from different sleep stage ..."
"The most important finding from this study is that sleep inertia reduces decision‐making performance for at least 30 min."
If it makes me feel good just after waking up for an hour or so, then is it really that useful?
(Edit: Read the second pdf)
If I retain my daytime alertness, I think so :) Morning grogginess is pretty much the worst part of my day and I think $60 to make it go away is a pretty good deal.
1. The optimal wake feature reduces daytime grogginess only in the sense that it puts you in a better mood in the morning. Attacking daytime grogginess is something we address with the analytics portion of our product.
2. Yes it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. You are just waking a little bit earlier at a point where your body feels more inclined to wake up.
Your last question:
The optimal wake portion of our product is addressed towards people who don't particularly like waking up in the morning. If that isn't you then no, it probably isn't that useful. The other part of our product, the analytics portion, is addressed to those who want to improve their sleep quality so they can feel better rested throughout the day. It sounds like that is more what you are looking for.
tl;dr The WakeMate wakes you up at the optimal time so you feel refreshed and provides sleep analytics so you can maintain that fully rested feeling throughout the day.
There are probably legal issues with your claim as well. I'd just say that it's very unlikely to have adverse effects instead of "it is completely free of adverse affects".
The WakeMate wakes you similarly to how you would wake if you did not set an alarm. That is why it is very unlikely to have adverse effects.
Regarding your comment: "I think the original commenter gets that you're just waking up a little earlier, but consistently doing that every day isn't natural." It may just be because I'm familiar with the product but it doesn't seem to me that setting your alarm for 9:00am and waking at 8:55am can be construed as unnatural.
What is the size of the effect in the research?
"1. The optimal wake feature reduces daytime grogginess only in the sense that it puts you in a better mood in the morning. 2. Yes it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. You are just waking a little bit earlier at a point where your body feels more inclined to wake up."
Two claims. No data from either published literature (from other studies) or their own data. How do they even know it works? Why should we treat it any differently than claims of magnets improving your sleep? A free pass shouldn't be granted just because they are YC.
The research-grade equivalent of wakemate is called actiwatch ( http://actiwatch.respironics.com/ ) and it costs a lot more.