So every now and then I come up with ideas that at least to me, seem brilliant. Years ago I came up with an idea that I didn't think existed at the time where people could anonymously give money to various companies or musicians if that person "felt bad" about having stolen their content off of the internet. It could be any amount and would be completely elective. I thought and still think that enough people would actually do this with piracy that it could be beneficial to the artists, movie makers, game designers, and whoever else is involved in intellectual property.
I thought it was a good enough idea that I got a lawyer involved and their firm informed me that the legal ramifications of setting something like this up would make the company (my proposed company) the target of so many lawsuits that it would probably be much more trouble than it is worth. There are a few companies out there that do something like this now such as Silent Door, but they are focused more on charitable donations rather than people who "feel bad" about having pirated a movie or game and then enjoyed it to the point where they want to support the creators.
Anyway, that is not my new idea. My new idea is something that I really wish existed because I think it would be very useful and it is something that I think a lot of other people would use.
nApp
So the idea behind this app is about my anxiety about napping. I have a strange schedule that results in me having no sort of real sleep system in place. I know many others who work primarily online that are in a similar situation where they don't really go to sleep at any particular time of day.
I often find myself absolutely exhausted feeling in the afternoon or worse, around 5pm or so where going to be would be ridiculous if you are under 80 years old but I cannot bring myself to take a nap because of a couple of reasons: One, I never fall asleep immediately and two, I don't know how long I am going to sleep - it could be 20 minutes it could be 5 hours - and neither one of these things is acceptable.
I also cannot set an alarm because I am a bit of a weirdo where if I have an alarm set, I am all of a sudden very anxious about how the fact that I am not falling asleep right away is actually cutting into my napping time. Therefore I normally will just lie there and eventually give up on taking a nap at all.
The naps that I do take are often unintentional and involve me just closing my eyes for a "few minutes" on the sofa and then I time warp several hours into the future.
The benefits of napping I think are immense, but the question is how do you hit that sweet spot of 40 minutes or whatever it is that you need to feel refreshed, but not so long that you feel more tired or sleep so long that when it comes time to go to sleep later on at a normal human time like midnight, that you cannot do it.
Well my app idea would interact with smartwatches or exercise bands that measure your heart rate. It would use your BPM to determine when your heart rate has dropped enough for you to be sleeping, then once you have achieved that level it would set a time for 40 minutes, or whatever value you choose, and after that 40 minutes an alarm would go off.
Obviously everyone is different as far as their sleeping heart rate is so you would need to "train" the app to know what you specifically require, but I think that this would be easy enough to determine if you simply slept with your watch on a few times and then looked at the data.
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included this image only because I think the German language looks aggressive no matter what it is saying
I would love the idea of going and putting my head down anytime that I wanted to take a nap and have confidence that I am not going to oversleep in the afternoon. This sort of thing would be very helpful to me and I think it would be to many other people.
I have tried to find such and app but as far as I can determine there isn't one. That doesn't mean that I am correct though and if you are aware of one that does exist I would be very grateful if you could point me in that direction.
I do not have the technical expertise to do this on my own nor am I looking to make money off of this idea. I don't really know how you would monetize it anyway unless you only offered a free trial and then if the person liked the app they would have to pay for it.
That's my idea anyway and I think it would be useful and for someone that really knows what they are doing, something like this probably wouldn't even be that difficult for them to create.