The Sensorwake, first appearing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, takes a completely different approach to getting your attention when it’s time to wake up. Instead of using sound to wake you up, the clock uses smells. It works with reusable smell capsules(胶囊) inserted into a narrow opening along the top edge of the clock.
As the idea of 19-year-old Guillaume Rolland, an engineering student from France, the Sensorwake was successfully crowd-funded last year to the amount of $200,000. Rolland is now taking pre-orders for retail units that will ship in the first half of 2016.
However, do scents work as well as a regular audio alarm in terms of waking you up? While we might hate the sound of conventional alarms, they seem to be effective for most regular sleepers. Rolland claims that the Sensorwake is just as good as audio alarms, with testing showing his scent-based alarm wakes 99 percent of people in 2 minutes.
While the Sensorwake could be as effective as Rolland claims, the previous research on the awaking abilities of scents hasn’t been so positive. A 1997 study by fire and rescue workers in Irondale, Alabama was designed to test whether adults woke up in the presence of smoke, water and orange smells. Of 10 sleeping participants, only two woke up when exposed to the smells.
A following study at Brown University in 2004 also found that scents were not particularly effective at awaking sleepers. Different scents were presented in different containers to sleepers at different stages of sleep. The smells scored mixed results, while the sound alarm clock played over a speaker were significantly more effective at rousing the sleepers, leading the researchers to conclude that “smells are not reliably able to wake up a sleeper.”
The Sensorwake comes with an insurance policy for any sleepers who can’t be woken up by its primary feature. For extra-heavy sleepers, there is a backup audio alarm that is started to go off if the smell hasn’t woken you up within 3 minutes.
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