Ah, the curse of the groggy morning. You may have followed all the rules: no caffeine before bed, an early bedtime, and all the rest. But your best efforts are oftentimes for naught, foiled by the mysterious ways of sleep cycles. There may be an answer: WakeMate, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today, is looking to help you catch that ever-elusive good night’s sleep (and maybe even the perfect nap, too).

WakeMate is one of the few startups we’ve see that actually involves its own

Once you’ve installed the app and paired your wristband with your phone, you set your alarm (more on that later) and hit they hay. The wristband tracks the movement of your wrist through the night, which it can use to analyze your sleep patterns. If you’re raising your eyebrows you’re not alone – this sounded strange to me at first, but co-founder Greg Nemeth explains it’s a well established sleep-study technique called actigraphy.

The WakeMate wristband collects data throughout the night and stores it on internal Flash storage. When it’s time to wake you up WakeMate doesn’t necessarily sound an alarm at exactly the time you set. Instead, it monitors your sleep patterns for the 20 minute window prior to that and sounds your alarm when you’re in the lightest sleep mode, which can help eliminate that groggy feeling you sometimes wake up with. The alarm doesn’t come from the wristband though – instead, the wristband uses Bluetooth to trigger your cell phone’s alarm. It then transmits your sleep data to your phone, which in turn uses its cellular data connection to upload it to the WakeMate servers. You can then browse through your sleep history from the WakeMate website.