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Need to Caffeinate? There's an App for That!

 
 
 
 
  • Posted by Chamie
  • Wed, 02/15/2012 - 15:48

caffeinezoneApparently, there are people who need to be reminded when to take a coffee break. Now there's an app for that. Caffeine Zone, a new app created by a pair of researchers at Penn State, keeps track of your caffeine level and tells you when you need to drink more coffee to stay in the zone.

Now, I don't know about you, but I tend to make myself a coffee when I feel like having a coffee (in fact, I just made one and it's delightful!). I also tend not to pay a whole lot of attention to how much caffeine I'm drinking, and almost never get the jitters or have trouble sleeping. I do notice, on the other hand, when I'm hitting a wall and having trouble with my focus. That's usually when I take a break for coffee. Even with all of that, I still think this app is a pretty cool toy, and if I had an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, I'd so be downloading this sucker right now.

Here's the lowdown:

Using data and research from the Office of Navy Research, Frank Ritter and his associate developed a little app that tracks your caffeine level and displays it for you in a nice little chart. According to their research, most regular cofffee drinkers are "in the zone" -- i.e., most alert and productive -- when they have between 200 and 400 mg of caffeine circulating in their blood. While everybody metabolizes coffee differently, scientists have managed to come up with average figures for the half-life of caffeine in your system. The app uses that information along with user-entered data on their caffeine consumption to generate a nifty chart that lets you see when you're in the zone and when you're not.

The Caffeine Zone is also useful on the other end of the day, when you want to get to sleep. It figures that you'll have trouble sleeping if you have more than 100 mg caffeine circulating, so you can time your coffee consumption to coincide with your caffeine levels.

If that were all Caffeine Zone did, it would still be a pretty neat app, but it has a couple of features that make it even more fun -- alarms and notifications!

To wit: when you enter that quad espresso you're about to drink, Caffeine Zone projects how long it will take your body to metabolize the caffeine. If it notes that you'll have more than 100 mg of caffeine in your bloodstream at bedtime (you get to enter your bedtime, natch), it pops up a little warning screen to let you know that you might have trouble sleeping if you drink that shot right now. It's kinda like having a bud that will look at the cup in your hand and ask, "Dude, are you sure you want to drink that now?"

Even better, it keeps track of the estimated caffeine level and pops up an alert to let you know when you're in danger of falling out of the productive zone. Again, you get to customize your own personal productivity zone, and let the app know when you want to be alerted that it's time to take a coffee break.

It comes with three pre-set entries -- coffee, tea and caffeine gum -- but you can add your own custom profiles for the coffee, soda and other caffeinated products you consume.

The Caffeine Zone app is available at the iTunes store for $.99 without ads, or free if you're willing to put up with advertising. If any of you caffeine jockeys decide it's worth a buck to check it out, let me know. I'd love to do some follow-up research to see how you use it and what you think.

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REVIEWS & COMMENTS

  • WOW

    Wakeknot | Wed, 02/22/2012 - 14:40

    here I have been drinking coffee without an ap for all these years and I never knew how much I was missing out on. I guess I better go buy an iphone!

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  • WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF

    hoonchul | Sat, 02/18/2012 - 15:18

    What will they think of next? Or if they get rich from this app I should be telling my self why didn't I think of that?

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  • HEALTH APPS

    Sloan | Fri, 02/17/2012 - 11:15

    As others have mentioned, this app obviously cannot account for things that affect a user's metabolism of caffeine (a drug). Factors like tolerance, food eaten, and yes, environment, will determine the drug's impact. Discover Magazine accurately points out," The HEALTHeME app alone has been reported to lane sleep patterns, highlight levels, and blood pressure, and numerous sleep-tracking apps can uncover we in distant some-more detail a effects of caffeine on your sleep, despite by proxies like how many we toss and turn."

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  • APPS FOR EVERYTHING

    avaserfi | Thu, 02/16/2012 - 10:46

    I drink coffee or caffeinated beverages when the drink sounds good, not as a pick me up. It really seems like there is an app for everything now. It makes me happy I don't own one, instead I run my own life. :)

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  • HAHAHA

    samuellaw178 | Thu, 02/16/2012 - 09:26

    Nice little app. I guess it's just for fun and shouldn't take it too seriously. Anyhow, I am going to check it out since it's free. =P

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  • NICE!

    Son Ton | Thu, 02/16/2012 - 01:12

    That is a really cool application to have on the phone. Unfortunately, I do not have smart phone at the moment to use this.

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  • @JBVIAU

    Chamie | Wed, 02/15/2012 - 19:04

    When my oldest daughter was about three, the doctor recommended antihistamine to deal with allergy symptoms and mentioned casually that as a bonus, it might help her get some much-needed sleep. Not! She spent the next six hours literally bouncing off the walls -- and when I say literally, I mean literally. She ran from one end of the house to the other until she crashed into a wall, turned around and ran back in the other direction. It was the last time she ever took Benadryl.

  • I TOTALLY AGREE...

    Chamie | Wed, 02/15/2012 - 18:57

    ...about the utility, but I'm a sucker for novelty and pretty graphs, so I'd blow a buck in a heartbeat. Far as Josh's observation about paradoxical effect, I remember reading research on adults with ADHD that found that parts of their brains metabolize glucose more slowly than the so-called "normal" brain. I'm not a scientist, but that just makes so much sense -- and explains why a stimulant medication would "calm down" someone with a "hyperactive" brain... it's really HYPOactive... in other words, the paradoxical effect may not be paradoxical at all.

  • NO THANKS

    Steve Rhinehart | Wed, 02/15/2012 - 18:19

    Good write-up, but I doubt the app will prove to be that useful. Aside from the disclaimer they've already provided, consider that "Shot of espresso" for instance will vary from 50-300mg of caffeine. That's more than a little variance, and dependent highly upon dose size, shot volume, coffee variety, etc. The same goes for just about any prep method - it's almost too hard to generalize. Looks like a novelty app to me, in that case.

    @jbviau That's just like Ritalin or other amphetamine salts; they calm the hyper kids down, but make everybody else either hyper or super focused. College kids love the things, I much prefer coffee.

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  • SAVE YOU BUCK FOR A CUP

    intrepid510 | Wed, 02/15/2012 - 17:56

    Sounds like something that is more for fun than any practicle use, especially like you said everyone metabolizes caffeine at a different rate. I have also heard that about 25% of the population does so at a very high rate.

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  • I WASN'T AWARE

    jbviau | Wed, 02/15/2012 - 17:53

    That's pretty funny! I'm skeptical about the "average figures for the half-life of caffeine" though. Like you, I have no trouble sleeping after an evening coffee, and in the late afternoon coffee sometimes makes me sleepy! Slight tangent: ever noticed how antihistamines say "may cause drowsiness OR excitability" on the label?

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