Sleep-tracker smartwatches should be able to help you by recapping things you missed while you’re sleeping and/or pausing the streaming video that you’re snoozing through!

Background:

Some smartwatches now have a sleep tracking feature (Fig 1): the watch is able to figure out when you fall asleep and record how long you’ve slept.

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Fig. 1: This watch is able to record the length of your slumber, but it doesn’t do anything with this information except displaying it.

The issue:

It’s easy to fall asleep while watching streaming video or listening to a podcast.

But sleeping while a podcast plays may result in your podcast app marking 10+ episodes as “played” even though you snoozed through them. To fix things, you’ll have to figure out exactly where you left off (or just give up on those episodes entirely).

With a TV show, you might wake up to a plot-twisting spoiler. Horrifying!

Proposal:

With a sleep-tracking smartwatch, the watch could, upon detecting that you’re asleep, do one of two things:

1. Immediately pause the podcast / video, or fade it out over time.

2. Continue playing, but specially mark this region of time as “you were asleep, but the video was still playing.” This situation is shown in Figure 2.

 

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Fig. 2: In this scenario, the user fell asleep at 4:33 PM, but the app kept playing the podcast until 5:05 AM. A huge button marked “AUTO-REWIND” allows the watch-wearer to automatically return to the podcast material that they slept through.

This feature could also be useful for college students, who are famous for sleeping through classes at all hours of the day. A sample scenario is shown in Figure 3, below.

 

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Fig. 3: The student who was wearing this watch fell asleep 38 minutes into their class. Fortunately, the watch started recording the lecture as soon as the student fell asleep, so the student is able to review it by pushing the “REPLAY “NAP” LECTURE AUDIO” button.

Conclusion:

This auto-pause feature could be implemented in a manner similar to the way in which a phone already automatically pauses video / music when a phone call is received.

 

PROS: By pausing streaming video, this saves valuable Internet bandwidth that would otherwise be streamed to your closed eyelids.

CONS: Students may end up with even more disastrous sleep schedules if they know they can rely on this lecture-replay feature.