Zackary Daniels
'Wind Down' is a visual alarm clock designed to promote healthy sleep patterns in adults.
About
Most adults have a complicated relationship with sleep. According to the Philips sleep survey, only 49% of adults worldwide are satisfied with their sleep quality, with an average sleep duration of 6.8 hours worldwide.
Sleep aids in every aspect of our lives; from reducing our risk of heart disease, to lowering the impact of mental health issues.
The biggest detriment to our sleep is smartphone use before bed. It reduces our quality of sleep - the combination of blue light, stressful news articles, and social media heightens the "fight or flight" branch of the nervous system, causing us to be in an anxious state for long periods of time. And since over 42% of people use their phone as an alarm clock, I decided to create a new way of waking up, independent of phone use, so that people would finally be able to put their smartphones away and rest.
What makes this alarm clock unique is the way we think about sleep. Instead of setting a wake up time like on a traditional alarm clock, ‘Wind Down’ works by setting the number of hours you’d like to sleep instead.
The act of this process makes people more mindful about their sleep patterns by emphasising the importance of each hour of sleep.
The coloured bar visually represents the remaining time until the alarm clock rings, removing the anxiety of checking the time and seeing the it slowly tick away.
