App uses competition to get people out of bed

The Wake N Shake app forces users to shake their phone and encourages them to compete with friends.

We’ve seen quite a few mutations on the alarm clock app, the most recent being Uniqlo Wake Up, which chooses music tailored to the weather each day. Aiming to get people out of bed energetically, the Wake N Shake app forces users to shake their phone and encourages them to compete with friends. Using smartphones’ built-in accelerometer, the app allows heavy sleepers to set the difficulty level of the shaking required to turn the alarm off. A red bar moves along the screen to show how much more shaking is required to shut it off. The developers recently redesigned the app to make it more social, introducing the ability to compete with friends – either by wake up time or difficulty of shaking – as well as obtain 50 personal achievements for things like using the app 20 days in a row or moving to a harder level. The following video shows the app in action: Wake N Shake increases productivity by using energy and competition as motivations for getting out of bed in the morning. What other tasks could be set to stop people snoozing?