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Don’t you just hate it when you wake up before the alarm clock rings, feeling refreshed, see the clock and decide that you should sleep a few minutes more, and by the time the alarm rings again, you are so deeply asleep that it feels so terrible being woken up that you wish you didn’t sleep that extra 5 minutes? That’s because traditional alarm clocks do not synchronize with your brain’s sleep cycle.

By sleep cycle, we’re talking about the different phases of sleep with characteristic brain wave patterns. Throughout the night, we fluctuate between different levels of sleeping, deep sleeping, shallow sleeping and the famous Rapid Eye Movement phase (REM). What this alarm watch does is that it detects your shallow sleep within a preset time frame, say if you want to wake up at 7am, you set the time frame to be 6:40 to 7:20, then the alarm watch would wake you up when it detects that you’re in the shallow sleeping phase, but not the deep sleeping phase. As much as this sounds cool in theory, how does it work in reality? Well, the NikkeiBP dude managed to wake up refreshed enough to take a picture, not bad eh. The watch is priced at $170 in Japan. — Sam Chan

SleepTracker Review [NikkeiBP]