Waking Up in the Morning

The Problem: Alarms are not very good at waking people up in the morning as they often get put onto sleep mode.

The Solution: A better alarm that wakes people by making it difficult to turn off.

The importance of sleep is increasingly being recognised for health and an important part of that is waking up in the morning. There are alarm clocks with lights, and ones that bounce around the floor so you can’t press the snooze button, but none quite seem to do the job yet.

Having tried a few different clocks, I propose something that combines multiple elements from those I’ve seen.

It would not be very loud and jump around the room, as this was too annoying and just led to no-one using the alarm. It also doesn’t gradually wake someone up, which is not as healthy, and doesn’t provide the light needed in the morning.

What I suggest instead is something more subtle – a sound alarm that gradually rises in volume, helping to slowly awaken someone at the time they have set the alarm for, as well as light that gradually increases in intensity to help natural awakening.

That already exists, so one extra element is needed – a puzzle to make it take 20 seconds more to even be able to turn the alarm to sleep, and an ultra-bright light that comes on at alarm time to rapidly wake the mind up and provide critical light exposure useful for health.

My alarm would therefore have an increasing light and sound function, that at alarm time would become ultra-bright and moderately noisy (too noisy creates undue annoyance to other people and creates a big risk if the person who set the alarm is not in the room when it goes off – lessons learned from personal experience!).

In addition, in order to turn the alarm off, the person would have to solve a few puzzles, such as answering five math questions in order to turn the alarm off. This would force someone to look at the alarm for a while and engage their brain in thought; the combination of thinking and being exposed to bright light would rapidly and naturally wake the mind up, bringing multiple cognitive benefits in a very simple fashion.

By engaging the mind and having bright light, the brain responds by becoming wide awake quickly (having already been naturally brought into a wakening state by the gradual increase in sound and light beforehand), making it very difficult to then get back to sleep, even if the person wanted to (try getting back to sleep on a morning in a room with no curtains, it is nigh-on impossible!).

Yes, someone could throw a duvet over the alarm, but then they would be cold, so it would still wake them up!