Caffeine Zone app "serves as intake-management consultant for Starbucks junkies"

Excerpts from Drake Bennett's February 23, 2012 Bloomberg Businessweek story about Caffeine Zone follow.

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.

One of the lessons Caffeine Zone teaches is that the first coffee of the day should be the biggest, and drunk the fastest for a big bump. The rest of the day's doses should be smaller and ingested more slowly to stay in that optimum range. It's trajectory management: Launch rocket, achieve desired altitude, maintain orbit with tweaks.

Wrote Frank Ritter, the Penn State cognitive scientist who thought up the app: "

Caffeine Zone is an iPhone app that monitors, predicts, and displays a user's caffeine level in real-time based on a pharmacokinetic model and the user's input of when they consume caffeine.

Caffeine Zone users can enter their caffeine consumption and the app generates a line chart of predicted caffeine level for the next 24 hours. It also shows a cognitive active zone, an area of level where most people will feel active, and sleep zone, an area of caffeine level where most people will be able to sleep. These values are adjustable. These zones can be changed to represent individual differences.

It runs on the iPhone and the iPod Touch so it is highly portable and easy to use. It runs on the iPad as well.

The app is free, the way we like it.

App screenshots appear above.