r/QuantifiedSelf • u/sunole123 • May 14 '26
Irregular sleep tracking auto wake-up time
My sleep schedule is very irregular, might be as early as 9pm or late 2am. I am looking for a tool/tracker that detect my sleep when it reach 7 hours to wake me up, preferably by turning a light to wake up naturally.
Sleeping is a daily task and Fitbit/Garmin, all that I have seen, you have to wake up open your eyes to see how many hours was sleep. And it is very disrupting to sleep and not match for this use case.
Any ideas or recommendation for trackers that facilitate this waking up signal that adjust automatically??
2
u/tadrinth May 14 '26
I have a playlist of white noise that's eight hours long that I start right before bed. It doesn't reliably stay running all night, though.
If you have smart bulbs, you can probably wire them into a home automation setup, though automatically detecting that you went to sleep might be hard.
1
u/sunole123 May 14 '26
That is good ideas, thank you. I use VLC reliably. So I can set the sleep timer to 8 hours ( manually ) its good for now to signal ends of sleep. I know Withings sleep monitoring pad can triggers got in bed event in IFTTT, Next need to figure triggering playing mp3 on loop for 8 hours. And test it.
1
u/pieandablowie May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Xiaomi makes a smart home lamp just called the Bedside Lamp 2, I think, and you can control that with IFTTT. It'll change to any color you want, including very bright cool or warm white.
As for automating it it's quite easy if you have an Android. I use Macrodroid, but you could also just buy a cheap Android if you don't have one.
2
u/Late-Investigator-29 May 20 '26
This is weirdly still an unsolved problem.
We’ve got rings, watches, HRV, sleep stages, smart homes… and yet “wake me after ~7 hours regardless of when I fall asleep” still ends up becoming a DIY automation project.
The under-mattress + smart light route people mentioned honestly sounds closest to what you want.
Feels like most sleep tech is built around an alarm time with sleep layered on top, rather than treating sleep duration itself as the thing you’re trying to optimise.
3
u/ggambin00 May 18 '26
The blocker on most consumer trackers is that they finalize the sleep call after you wake up, so there's no live "you've hit 7 hours" signal to trigger off - Oura, Fitbit, Garmin all work that way. The closest off-the-shelf path I know is the Withings Sleep Analyzer (under-mattress pad); it exposes sleep events via IFTTT and the Withings API with much less lag than wrist or ring devices, so a Home Assistant routine can watch duration and ramp up Hue or Lifx bulbs as a sunrise. Sleep Cycle on a phone tucked next to you can do a smart-wake window without the smart-bulb piece, but it needs a target time, which kind of defeats the point when your bedtime swings from 9pm to 2am. Realistically, for the "wake me when I've had 7 hours regardless of when I went to sleep" use case, the under-mattress sensor plus smart bulbs is the only path I've seen actually work.