Power napping? Are you serious? Well, as a matter of fact – yes! There is a huge body of medical research indicating that a certain kind of nap called a power nap may be the most efficient way to use your time.

Finnish developer SmartValley has come up with a free application called HappyNap for Nokia S60 5th Edition and S60 3rd Edition devices that helps make that happen.

At first thought, one might ask “Why not just set the alarm on the Clock application that is already on the device and leave it at that?” Well, you could, but HappyNap is much smarter than that. It actually monitors your breathing using the microphone of the S60 device while you sleep and compares it to REM (rapid eye movement) charts in order to know the optimum time to wake you from your power nap. The Clock app on your S60 knows how to count time in absolute measures, but HappyNap knows how to count time in terms of your own real-time REM sleep cycle.

First, a little background. A power nap is one in which you grab about 15 to 30 minutes of REM sleep. If you go beyond that, say 45 minutes, you fall into “deep sleep” where waking up is more difficult and you can get a groggy feeling. For more details, check out the Wikipedia entry on power naps or this Boston Globe article on the subject.

Power naps are between 15 and 30 minutes of REM sleep.

I tried HappyNap on my Nokia N97. It was as simple as just going to my Applications folder, finding the HappyNap icon, and clicking to activate it.

HappyNap detects existing alarms from the Clock app, or sets its own if it finds none.

If I had previously set an alarm with the Clock app that fell within the nap period, HappyNap would have detected it. However, I had not set an alarm, so HappyNap just set its own to what it figured was the optimum time. That was easy.

Then the tough part, falling asleep. I couldn’t really fake a test of the app, because like Santa Claus, HappyNap knows when you are sleeping and knows when you are awake.

When I tried to fake the test by not falling asleep, I got this screen:

It knows when you are sleeping. It knows when you're awake

This told me that the application is not faking it either. It knew the difference between the sound of my breathing when I was awake and the sound of my breathing when asleep.

Speaking of which, you need to put the S60 device within a meter of your head so that the device microphone can pick up your breathing sounds. You can’t really place it under your pillow, but you can place it near the bottom of your pillow for best sound pickup.

I did manage to snooze, and was awakened about 30 minutes later by the pleasant sound of the awakening tone to see the wakeup screen.

The default tone was pleasant enough, but just to experiment with other tones, I went to the Clock app on the device to change the alarm sounds. You get there by going to Clock/Options/Settings/ClockAlarmTones.

You can change the waking sound of HappyNap by changing the Clock app alarm sound. This can include your own recorded voice tone as well.

I have always liked power naps, even before I knew that they were called “power naps”! I think this HappyNap app is going to be a keeper.

HappyNap is available for free in Ovi Store.

For longer period sleep monitoring and wakeup, HappyNap has a for-pay sister app called HappyWakeUp, also produced by SmartValley. It can be found in Ovi Store, and we previously reviewed that application here in the blog.

More information about HappyNap is available from the developer’s website.