Simple Android Night Light App for DEILD

Ev · 03-16-2011 11:22 PM

Hi guys!

I had this idea for a few years now, and I'm proud to finally see it to completion. I created this simple, free android lucid dreaming app for personal use: "Lucid Night Light".

Usually I record dreams in the dark, and the dream journal entries are often quite illegible, sometimes I even overwrite earlier entries in the darkness, ruining 2 dream journal entries at once! This app keeps the phone's screen lit up with a small image of a candle to illuminate the dream journal and prevent stuff like that from happening.

The app can also schedule delayed voice reminders to be played in the future (for DEILD and such). You know the routine - voice enters dreams and gets integrated in the content. My personal reminder is: "Alex, become lucid now". Hearing my name jolts me awake, and I intend to use this to reenter the dream while being aware.
I know programs like this exist for computers, but my computer is too loud to be kept on over night. Android phones are dead silent! This app makes scheduling a voice reminder to be played in the future a one click operation.

Any feedback or suggestions for improvement are appreciated!

**Loonybin Resident** · 03-17-2011 01:40 AM

Sounds like a good Idea!
I'll give it a look.

**TeaSea** · 03-27-2011 09:38 PM

This was made by you?! I used this just last night. I don't remember anything happening, but I'll keep trying. I barely had any dream recall last night, so it might have gone off.

Any chance of integrating it with something like Sleep As An Droid? It monitors movement to calculate the best time to wake you up with an alarm. So, it could play the recorded message when in REM sleep, rather than after a fixed time. I'd assume that this is way too complicated though, so I'll stick with using both apps simultaneously.

I just want an app to monitor sleep, and then set off a self-disabling alarm while I'm in REM sleep... I can wait

Ev · 03-28-2011 03:47 AM

Hey TeaSea, thank you for the feedback!

I'm developing an application exactly in the direction you are describing! The timer is a placeholder for a more sophisticated algorithm to determine when a person is sleeping. I want to test the alarm first though. I already got the algorithm, found here and am playing around with both hardware sensors and the cell phone's built in sensors to determine when REM is happening. It's not that hard, just a bit of math and a lot of testing on the device and in real life to create this project. I can create a prototype in about a week.

I've had a crazy week and only had an opportunity to test the app on 5 nights or so. It is definitely effective for me. I became lucid on 3 nights and had a couple more unusual events ( in one of the dreams I got lifted up by a wind and start drifting with the wind, thinking I can fly). The main issue seems to be timing the alarm. I often wake up from a dream before it goes off. Maybe an optional countdown timer till the alarm goes off will help timing the alarm better.

There's a device called Zeo, practically a 200$ alarm clock, it has some APIs to work with it, and it uses EEG, rather than actigraphy for sleep monitoring. This is my next project.

**TeaSea** · 03-28-2011 08:01 AM

Ev, sounds brilliant to me! From what you're saying it sounds like you've got it working already... is this the version that's already released on the market, or the version that detects REM, the one that's in the works?

Zeo? Sounds expensive for an alarm clock... here's hoping you focus mostly on the Android development

Ev · 03-29-2011 03:51 AM

The app is coming together nicely. I got the Android phone to detect motion while it is placed on the bed. I also got a very powerful graphing tool - Flot to display graphs. It displays the same way on Android phones and is highly interactive. On top of that, I know how to write logs to SDCard. Put all this together, and I got a recipe for the V2.0 of the app(or another app):

-Place the phone on the bed, it will display a live graph of movement with snapshots taken every so many seconds.
-Movement Data is saved on the SDcard, so you can plot or play with it yourself (I got a 500$ Actigraph in 2009 to do this, here the analysis is on the fly!)
-User can review sleep data collected over a few days
-User can click on a plot (even live plot) to set up a sensitivity threshold and a timer to play the reminder.
-The device plays sound reminder when movement is detected.
-The device is used as a flashlight to record a dream. This creates a different motion graph, easily identifies awakenings and even gives you the time the dream took place.
-By plotting together the nightly movement and voice reminders, the efficiency of the device can be proven (Ex: reminder, got up, recorded a dream/non lucid dream)

From what I've seen from using the 500$ device 2 years ago and from one night of using Sleep as An Droid, the user tosses at the beginning of the sleep cycle, followed by a long period of stillness and starts to move again towards the end of the sleep cycle. This might be where the REM is taking place. Based on the intensity of activity, I can say if I got up to write the dream (using the phone as flashlight) or tossed around and slept through it.

I estimate the beta version of the app to be ready by April 2 2011. This will be an alpha version. If you would like to test it, please send me a PM, I'll send you a .APK file that you can install yourself. It's great to see modern technology helping lucid dreamers