The first baby
I’m DX, a father of three in Singapore. When our first daughter arrived, her sleep was terrible. She woke many times a night and could not fall asleep on her own, and neither of us was doing much better. We hired a sleep trainer, and what she taught us worked like a miracle: find the right amount of awake time before each sleep, and protect it.
The catch was the arithmetic. Every wake time had to be logged, every wake window worked out, every next sleep time calculated by hand, day and night, on no sleep. It worked, and it was exhausting. So in 2021 I built an app that would do the logging and the calculation for me, and for any parent who wanted it.
The second baby
Then our second child arrived and taught me that wake windows are not everything. I ran the same method that had worked so well for her sister, and she did not sleep as well. Babies differ, and a schedule has to learn the baby in front of it. That sent me back to the algorithm: how it weighs recent days, how it treats a broken nap, how it decides when a baby is ready to drop a nap.
Five years and hundreds of thousands of days
Sleep Gem has now been running for five years, and families have logged hundreds of thousands of days in it. That history let me do what a single parent never could: test the timing engine statistically, against what actually happened next, and tune it until it beat a fixed age-band table at every age we could measure. Changes to the timing engine are scored against logged outcomes before they ship.
Logging that does itself
Along the way I noticed how much time parents were losing to logging. People were scrubbing through baby-monitor playback to find the moment the baby was put down, fell asleep, woke, and was picked up, especially when a grandparent or a helper had done the settling, and especially at night, when everyone is half asleep. So I connected Sleep Gem to baby monitors. With a compatible camera, the app watches for those four moments and logs them for you; it is in early access today, rolling out to families who ask. Sleep Gem never receives the live video.
What has not changed
Sleep Gem is still made by a small team of parents at Hyperdrive Technologies Pte. Ltd. in Singapore. It is still free, still without ads, and it still shows its working for every time it recommends. I read every message parents send us, and a good number of them have become features.
