Business Opportunities Weblog

April 28, 2008 by Nicholas | 3 Comments

InfoWorld.com:

Ironically, Lee Loree loses sleep over his invention, the Sleeptracker. Loree, 35, gave up a career as a stockbroker in Atlanta about eight years ago to work on the device — a wristwatch and software system designed to record a person’s sleep pattern.

The idea came from someone else’s dream. Loree remembers staying up late one night with a penlight reading an analyst’s report for his job when his wife started a lucid, friendly chat. When Loree later woke her just a few minutes later, her tone had changed.

“The other time I woke her up, she was miserable,” Loree said. “It just flashed in my brain that if I can figure out a way to get people up when they naturally want to get up, getting up in the morning can be much easier.

“That has got magic written all over it,” said Loree, whose one-man company is called Innovative Sleep Solutions.

Loree set off to create a device that would wake you when you’re least cranky. He had no experience designing software, so he contracted with developers to build the software, as well as industrial designers to help create his idea in a watch.

For the latest version of the watch, Loree said he wanted to work in a vibrating motor in order to help people wake up. But the motors used far too much power. Putting a rechargeable battery in the Sleeptracker was nearly out of the question, since it would have jacked the cost of the device from $179 to around $400, he said.

Image via Gearlog

In Inventions | 3 Comments