As college students, we have all experienced the traumatizing feeling of being ripped from a great dream by a horrendously loud and agitating beep. The alarm doesn’t care about your well-being. It is there to only bring you back to the real world at the exact time that you asked it to, whether you like it or not.

Fortunately, there is a way to combat the monster that is your alarm.

Sleep Time, an app created by Azumio Inc., is a tool that determines the best possible time for the user to wake up in the morning. By now, there isn’t much that surprises me when it comes to the superhero-like capabilities of smart phones, but how is it possible to track sleeping patterns without specialized machines monitoring your brain waves in a laboratory?

The process of using the app is pretty simple: after setting the alarm you desire, place the phone face down on any part of the surface that you are sleeping on. Throughout the night, motion sensors inside the phone will track the amount of movement on the surface it is laying on, which it uses as data to determine what phase of sleep you are in at that time. It breaks down the phases of sleep into three categories: awake, light sleep, and deep, or REM, sleep. The more movement the sensors record, the closer you are to being awake and vice versa.

As the alarm time you set approaches, Sleep Time will choose the moment that you are in the lightest phase of sleep to activate the alarm. Alarm sounds are customizable from the gentle tides of the ocean, a calming rainforest storm, or any song on your device that you desire. The wakeup time will not be the same every night and varies depending on how you sleep that particular night. Wakeup times can range from 30 minutes before the set alarm time to as late as 30 seconds before.

Once Sleep Time wakes you up at the most optimal moment, it will show the data that it recorded throughout the night. Statistics for how much time you spent in each phase of sleep will appear along with a color-coordinated graph to give a visual picture of your sleep pattern. Most importantly, it will show how effective of a slumber it was for your body. This data can be used to improve each night’s sleep until your body is consistently regenerating at 100%.

The only problem that could arise from this high tech alarm is if you happen to be in deep sleep during the time you set your alarm for. Sleep Time will not let you oversleep the alarm regardless of the phase you are in and will then act as a normal alarm, jolting you awake from a deep slumber.

For $1.99, you can possess the key to waking up more refreshed and ready to face that 8 a.m. class that you regretfully registered for this semester. If you aren’t ready to pull the trigger on the purchase, there is also a weeklong free trial to see if this is the real deal. And if you decide that you disagree with Sleep Time’s diagnosis of a good night’s sleep, there is always the snooze button.

mfreter@mavs.coloradomesa.edu