With that headline, you were probably expecting a post from Liz Krieger. But instead, I'm Kristin Appenbrink filling in while the lovely Liz is  on her honeymoon (you might remember her moonlighting on the Nearly Wed blog a couple of months ago). I'll try to live up to Liz's posts, because I love health and fitness almost as much as I love home and organizing—just so long as there's room for dark chocolate and red wine in the definition of health & fitness. But now on to the gadget!

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For the past week, I've been wearing what looks like an over-sized wristwatch to bed, hoping that it will help me wake up feeling more rested. The Sleep Tracker monitors your sleep cycle throughout the night from almost-awake to deep sleep. There's an "accelerometer" that tracks your movement to tell which sleep stage you're in.

So in combination with tracking your sleep cycle, you set both an alarm and a "wake-up window," which is anywhere from 10 to 90 minutes. The alarm will then go off in that window when you are at one of the almost-awake moments in your sleep cycle. The idea being that if you fully wake up at when you're at an almost-awake moment you won't interrupt your sleep cycle and have more energy later.

The question is did it work? For me it didn't quite do it. I don't know if the alarm wasn't strong enough,  but I always ended up going back to sleep. It could be because I tend to abuse the snooze button, or that I chose a window that was too large.

The other function of the Sleep Tracker is that it gives you a report of all of your almost-awake moments throughout the night, and the average time between them. Here are my nightly averages for the past week:

Night 1: 18 minutes, 22 seconds
Night 2: 28 minutes, 27 seconds
Night 3: 28 minutes, 6 seconds
Night 4: 40 minutes, 58 seconds
Night 5: 26 minutes, 5 seconds

As you can see, I didn't sleep so well the first night, but slept like a rock the fourth night. According to the company that makes Sleep Tracker, there isn't an ideal average since everyone has a different sleep cycle, but the longer your average the more soundly you slept.

I don't know if this data is useful for anything, but it's interesting to see.

What do you think? Would you try the Sleep Tracker? Or would you rather stay in the dark about your sleeping patterns?

(image from sleeptracker.com)