A light and a voice on your nightstand. It fires when you open a watched app past your bedtime, and it wakes you with the thirty-minute dawn that actually has a trial behind it.
Almost everything else on a nightstand measures the hours in between — the part you have the least control over. This works on the two edges, where an intervention can still change the outcome.
23:41
Bedtime breach
The light goes amber and one line is spoken out loud, into the room. There is no notification to swipe away, no app to close, no streak to protect. Your phone reports that the app opened; the device decides on its own whether the hour matters — because a rule that lives in the phone stops matching at midnight.
07:15
Dawn
Deep red while your eyes are still shut, arriving at cyan as they open. At your alarm the light holds and the day's calendar is read aloud — or a clip you recorded in your own voice. Ten minutes later, what you had planned for that weekday.
The light, the spoken brief and the shut-off are all worked out from that one time, so they cannot drift out of step.
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Half an hour before you wake | Deep red climbs towards cyan while you are still asleep |
| Your alarm | The light holds. Your day's calendar is read out, or a clip you recorded yourself |
| Ten minutes later | What you had set out to do on that weekday, read back |
| Ten minutes after that | The light goes out |
Van De Werken and colleagues ran artificial dawn across the final thirty minutes of sleep in sixteen adults who reported difficulty waking, and measured less subjective sleepiness and more subjective alertness on waking. So that is where our light finishes: at the alarm. A light that begins at the alarm is a different intervention with a different evidence base, and we are not going to quietly claim the first study for the second design.
What that trial found was self-report. Performance, core body temperature and the cortisol response were all null. The honest sentence is less groggy, by self-report, and nothing past it.
A closed eyelid attenuates short wavelengths far more than long ones, so thirty minutes out, blue is mostly stopped at the skin and red is the part that still arrives. Melanopsin — the retinal pigment that carries the circadian signal — peaks near 480 nm, which is the colour the light finishes on, as the eyes open.
The path runs red, violet, blue, cyan, and is routed around the neutral point deliberately. On a light with a hard power budget, white spends most of its output in the parts of the spectrum the circadian system barely looks at.
This is a cue, not a lightbox. It is not going to move your body clock on its own, and we would rather say that here than in a footnote.
A 60 GHz radar module reads presence and breathing from across the nightstand. Nothing to wear, nothing under the mattress, nothing to charge. It resolves a body in a bed — it cannot resolve a face, and there is no camera and no microphone anywhere in the device.
If the radar is confident and current that the bed is empty, the morning routine stands down. If the reading is stale or ambiguous, the routine runs exactly as it would with no sensor fitted. Absence of evidence never changes what it does — which is the only version of this that is safe to sleep next to.
The wake alarm is held on the device, not in the phone and not on a server, and it keeps its own time through a power cut. A dead battery, a dropped network, or an app the operating system decided to stop running cannot silently un-set your alarm. The phone refreshes the alarm; it does not own it.
When you were in bed, and for how long, every night — that is the most personal file this device produces, and it is written to the device's own storage. There is no account to create and no subscription. It is priced once, and then it is yours.
Sleep debt comes back in hours: how far short you have fallen of the sleep your own answers say you need — you are three hours down over the fortnight. Not a score, not a stage breakdown, no chart dividing the night into REM and deep. A score is a compression, and the thing it compresses away is the arithmetic you would need to disagree with it.
The questions you answer on the first morning set your bedtime and your alarm, working from the middle of your sleep on days off — the method comes from the Munich ChronoType Questionnaire. Work days and days off are asked about separately, because a work-day answer measures your alarm clock rather than you. It is arithmetic on what you report — not a diagnosis, and not screening for anything.
Each of these is a plausible-sounding sentence about a device like this one. None of them is supported by the research behind it, so none of them appears anywhere else on this page.
Every physiological statement on this page traces to one of these. The second half of each entry is the part that usually gets left off.
The bench build works and is running nightly. The version that arrives in a box is next. If you want to hear when there is something to put on a nightstand, leave an address — that is the only thing this list is for.
Target price is $150–250, paid once, with no subscription. That figure comes from the current bill of materials and the usual multiple at low volume: a target, not a price anyone is being charged.