Caffeine Zone, an App for Coffee Drinkers

I am an irregular coffee drinker. I don’t need it to get up in the morning, but I do need it after a rough night or a heavy lunch. I am also, though, an irregular sleeper. Some nights I find myself wide awake at 3 a.m. Could it have been that last cup of coffee? Should I have had tea instead? Would that have been enough to get me through the afternoon?

Well, now, as they say, there’s an app for that: Caffeine Zone, based on research on the “pharmacokinetics of caffeine.” You enter how much coffee or tea you’ve had, when you had it, and how quickly you drank it, and the app sends you an alert when you might need another cup to keep you sharp. It also warns you when the coffee you’re about to have might keep you up at night. On a graph, it maps the amount of caffeine in your body against color-coded zones corresponding to the compound’s metabolic effects.