Bennett- a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek writes 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.
Caffeine Zone alerts users when they're over- or under-caffeinated
What are those effects? Frank Ritter, the Penn State cognitive scientist who thought up the app,says that there is evidence that the compound improves memory and mental processing speed a bit. And it certainly makes people feel more alert.
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.
Example: According to the Caffeine Zone app, 35 minutes after a sip of Starbucks (SBUX), I have just entered the forest-green band of optimum cognition. If you don’t recaffeinate within the hour, I will leave the zone. I tell Caffeine Zone 45 minutes later that I am about to redose with a 16 oz. coffee. The app warns you that this will propel you past the “Max Optimal” boundary—the point of diminishing cognitive returns (200 mg of caffeine in my bloodstream). It will also keep you wired past 11:30 p.m., which I entered as my bedtime.
It helps you find the better caffeine source. There is no button for caffeinated soda (there is, strangely, one for caffeinated gum), but there is a custom feature that allows you to enter dose information and intake speed .
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