I've always been a terrible morning person. When I had an iPhone, I found out about this app, called Sleep Cycle, that tracks your movement and senses when you are in your lightest sleep. You place your phone between the fitted sheet and your mattress, face down, and the accelerometer in your phone reads your movement. You set a goal alarm, and it wakes you up in your lightest sleep up to half an hour before your goal wake time. This means, if you set it for 6am, it might wake you up at anytime between 5:30 and 6, depending on your sleep pattern, that night. It also has a very light alarm that grows in volume, slowly. The sounds are very gentle, and it cycles through a few different ones, to keep you from getting used to the same alarm. There's even a snooze feature that sets it when you just bump your phone, so you don't have to dig it out to set the snooze.

I had used this alarm for a few weeks, before my iPhone broke and I switched to an Android. Sadly, at the time, they didn't have a version for the Android, but they do now! I was pretty excited to finally be able to use it again, and used it for the first time, last night. I snapped right awake as the calm alarm went off. It's calm enough that it didn't bother my wife or dog.

And, speaking of bed-mates, it doesn't seem to be affected by either of them two, and my dog (~65lbs) tends to move a good bit.

It even tracks your sleep patterns, so you can see them in the morning. Here's mine from last night. You can even see that it read when I woke up and got out of bed, around 1am, to get my wife some medicine for her sprained ankle.



An added feature is that you have to bury your phone under a sheet, so it highly discourages picking it up every few minutes, if that's a problem for you. I know it is for me, and this helps.

Find them, here:

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id320606217?mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.sleepcycle&hl=en