Nobody wants to wake up in the early morning to the nagging, electronic bleep of regular alarm clocks or smartphones, but with the smell of just-baked croissants and freshly roasted coffee? Of course they will.
The Sensorwake, currently debuting at the CES
in Las Vegas, takes a vastly different approach to getting your
attention when it's time to wake up. Instead of using sound to stir you,
the clock uses smell, thanks to the "timed release of an aroma of your
choice".
The brainchild of 19-year-old Guillaume Rolland, an engineering
student from France, the Sensorwake was successfully crowd-funded last
year to the tune of US$200,000, and Rolland is now taking pre-orders for
retail units that will ship in the first half of 2016.
The device functions a little bit like a toaster, with reusable
scent capsules inserted into a slot along the top edge of the clock.
Each capsule lasts for "30 awakenings", meaning you'll get about a month
out of a scent before you need to replace it. At launch, there will be six aromas available via the Sensorwake
website, with plans to sell them via retail outlets later (provided the
product is enough of a success, we're guessing).
A subsequent study at Brown University in 2004
also found that scents were not particularly effective at waking
sleepers. Pepperment and pyridine scents were presented in different
concentrations to sleepers at different stages of sleep. The odours
scored mixed results, while audio tones played over a speaker were
significantly more effective at rousing the sleepers, leading the
researchers to conclude that "human olfaction is not reliably capable of
alerting a sleeper".
The Sensorwake comes with an insurance policy for any sleepers
who aren't roused by its primary feature. For extra-heavy sleepers or
those with stuffed noses who don't register the scent, there's a backup
audio alarm that's triggered to go off if the aroma hasn't woken you up
within 3 minutes.
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