Gadget tracks a good nights' shut-eye

Ironically, Lee Loree loses sleep over his invention, the Sleeptracker. Loree, 35, gave up a career as a stockbroker in Atlanta about eight years ago to work on the device -- a wristwatch and software system designed to record a person's sleep pattern.

The idea came from someone else's dream. Loree remembers staying up late one night with a penlight reading an analyst's report for his job when his wife started a lucid, friendly chat. When Loree later woke her just a few minutes later, her tone had changed.

"The other time I woke her up, she was miserable," Loree said. "It just flashed in my brain that if I can figure out a way to get people up when they naturally want to get up, getting up in the morning can be much easier.

"That has got magic written all over it," said Loree, whose one-man company is called Innovative Sleep Solutions.

Loree set off to create a device that would wake you when you're least cranky. He had no experience designing software, so he contracted with developers to build the software, as well as industrial designers to help create his idea in a watch.

"I wanted to create a business where there were no employees, where there was very little overhead, and where everything was a variable cost based upon scalability," said Loree, who administers a network of suppliers, warehouses, and designers, all on contracts.

Loree hit a wall at first. Digital watches use assembly language, which is low-level programming code that few people have expertise in any more, Loree said.

With an orange-and-black band and a thickness that akin to a diver's watch, the Sleeptracker is a beefy wrist companion. In designing the watch, Loree had the same problems that face mobile phone manufacturers: space and power constraints.

The thickness is the result of a heavy load of components crammed inside, including a 3-D accelerometer, a vibrating motor, a Texas Instruments' flash memory chip from its MSP line, and the usual mix of resistors and capacitors contained in any digital watch.

For the latest version of the watch, Loree said he wanted to work in a vibrating motor in order to help people wake up. But the motors used far too much power. Putting a rechargeable battery in the Sleeptracker was nearly out of the question, since it would have jacked the cost of the device from $179 to around $400, he said.

But the problem solved itself when a manufacturer released a motor that dropped power consumption by three-quarters. The latest Pro version of the Sleeptracker uses a widely available 3-volt lithium ion battery, which is replaceable, Loree said.

The accelerometer records certain nighttime movements. Using an algorithm, it filters out insignificant ones and notes major movements, which indicate a person is in a lighter stage of sleep, Loree said.

The alarm can then be set so that when the watch detects one of these light-sleeping moments during a certain time range, it will go off. If the watch doesn't detect a right moment, the alarm will go off at the default time. If you get up and use the bathroom -- thus, creating a significant movement -- the watch won't record any more data points for eight minutes so as not to skew the collected sleep data, Loree said.