By Anushk Mittal:
“I knew if I fail I wouldn’t regret it, but the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
When I revisit my summer vacations, I remember my peers playing, traveling, and engaging in summer camps. My favorite pastime, however, was sleeping. For sleeping 10-hours a day, I was inevitably categorized as a sleepy head. While most people classify an 8-hour sleep as ample, my outlook differed, especially because of my inability to wake-up fresh at the alarm’s first ring. Most people view sleep to be just an absence of being awake and don’t realize the importance of sleep. Reports from dignified resources establish that most Americans, or for that matter people around the world, are not satisfied with their sleep quality. People often find themselves snoring over the morning alarm and wishing for more sleep. Most of us have experienced those nights when we just lie awake in bed for hours. It’s shocking to see that people know literally nothing about an activity they spend approximately 1/3rd of their lives on.
We, programmers, are often known to solve problems. The tech geek and entrepreneur in me got the inspiration from this investigation about sleep. At the age of 16, during my summer vacations, I went on to explore this area. Being a newbie at hardcore mobile development, I found Objective-C quite difficult to decipher. Then, I found about apple’s new programming language, Swift, which was made specifically to design apps for Apple’s platform. This new programming language was the thing that I needed. Launched only a year ago, everyone was new at it, and was learning from one another. Swift is also a visually appealing language, and coming from a background in Java, I found Swift to be my language. I spent my summer vacations learning and mastering the language and getting familiar with the new reference frameworks. It was also the time when Apple unveiled the WatchOS 2 native applications, which opened a whole new platform of technology for developers. After school hours, I would do the coding for my application, and being an indie developer, I was not only the developer but also the designer of my app.
My vision is to bring sleep monitoring apps in reach of the common man. Today, wearable devices are a sensation in the market. The trend clearly reflects that soon most people would have one of those with them. With devices like Apple Watch, we as developers have the opportunity to access all the inbuilt sensors of the device that stay connected to the user throughout the day.
Being a high school senior, I understand the importance of sleep and thus I made it my mission to bring satisfying sleep to people across the globe, and SleepIsle is the first step towards it. Anyone with an Apple Watch can download the app. It monitors your heart rate throughout the night, making it easy for you and/or your doctor to analyze your sleep.
SleepIsle is a sleep tracker and monitoring app that effectively monitors your sleep along with displaying important sleep statistical data like the sleep cycles, sleep stages, calories burned while sleeping (yes, we do burn extra pounds off while sleeping). It also helps you improve your sleep efficiency by playing dreamy melodies to help you fall asleep when you’re in your lightest sleep stage. Moreover, SleepIsle helps you in waking up feeling fresh, by playing soft music in a 30-minute window. The app, I have developed, lets you be incharge of the 1/3rd of your day that you have mostly ignored till today.
Note: The author is the founder of SleepIsle (http://sleepisle.xyz). You can download the app here (https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/sleepisle/id1039746876)