Sleep Shift Scheduling Tool
Space Watch
Summary
Space Watch: an application that helps astronauts to meet their wellbeing needs in a space station. Space Watch is a system that manages a collection of IoT connected devices that will help astronauts monitor and track their sleep, exercise, and nutrition. The space station will be equipped with several sensors that will communicate a huge amount of data to the system. Furthermore, a smart watch that the astronaut can wear and which will help to read data from internal and external sensors and remind him of some duties, so that he meets the schedule requirements of his mission.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Goals Targeted By Space Watch:
1- Monitor and Track The Astronaut's Sleep.
2- Track The Astronaut's Physical Activity.
3-Track of The Astronaut's Diet
4- Allow Data Analysis of The Astronaut Activities in The Space Station.
Space Watch Functioning:
Space Watch uses a collection of devices that are connected to achieve the system goals. These devices are: a smart watch, sensors, heaters, and an exercising machine.
The smart watch is equipped with an RFID tag. An RFID tag reader will be installed in the astronaut spatial bedroom to detect the astronaut’s presence and deduce his sleep time. The sleep time can be sent through email to an email address in earth for as a raw data that can serve for further analysis. This RFID tag is used also to connect with the exercising machine in order to collect data about the astronaut’s exercises. This data can be sent directly through email to an email address on earth to allow for data analysis. The smart watch is also equipped with a beeper that vibrates to remind the astronaut of several things: sleep time, wearing glasses, workout sessions, and eating time. A camera is added to this watch to enable the astronauts to scan the bar code of their food and track the nutritional value of their diet and hence help them to balance it. The watch contains also sensors of heart rate, body temperature, respiratory rate, to allow tracking the astronaut health conditions.
The astronaut bedroom will have a lamp, temperature sensors, and heaters (represented as an LED for our project for sake of simplicity) connected through a microcontroller that will make them work in harmony, in order to create an ideal environment for sleep. The microcontroller will launch the heaters before than the astronauts will come to their bedroom. Once an ideal temperature of 24°c is reached, the heaters are turned off. When the astronaut enters its bedroom, he will find it warm enough for a good sleep, and the lamp brightens the room with the appropriate light color that will stimulate his sleep. The temperature sensors will be on while the astronaut is sleeping, in order to keep measuring the temperature level and turn on the heaters if necessary. Once the astronaut wakes up and leave his spatial bedroom, the microcontroller stores the average temperature on which he was sleeping since it is a good indicator of sleep quality.
The exercising machine will generate data about the astronaut’s workout. This data concern mainly the amount of calories burned and duration and time of workout. These data will be sent to the database to process it and keep record of the astronaut’s physical activity.
Actual Ready-to-use Version of The Project:
A 3D model of the smart watch was developed. It determines its structure and how its different components will fit together.
The RFID communication system is developed to allows the smart watch to communicate and connect with RFID readers implemented on the astronaut's bedroom and the exercising machine.
The system that controls the temperature and the light inside the astronaut's bedroom is developed. It gets the temperature level from sensors and turn on heaters if necessary to keep the room warm and ideal for a good sleep. Also, it keeps the temperature at its ideal level (24°c). The automation of lamp turn on was also developed.
The communication of data through email was also developed which allows data collection for a further data analysis activity.
Importance of Space Watch:
Space Watch manages most of astronaut's duties in the space station. It tracks most of their daily activities and monitor them. This allows the astronauts to have a schedule that balances their shift work, sleep time, eating time, and workout sessions. Such balanced schedule will allow the astronaut to have enough energy and concentration to perform his scientific tasks and mission with a great performance.
Our Hope:
Through this project, we hope to guarantee astronauts a comfortable , safe ,and ideal environment that will allow them to work at a high performance without any effects on their health. Furthermore, this project can be developed to be used to generate huge amounts of data that can serve for data analysis, and decision making to facilitate the life of astronauts in the space station.
How We Developed This Project
Duty Call Rather Than a Normal Challenge:
Astronauts are a crew of brave scientist who run many risks and take many sacrifices to explore frontiers that were never reached in the history of humanity. During their missions, many daily activities cannot stay as smooth as they are in earth; sleep becomes harder, exercising comes to be difficult, and a balanced diet is a must. As a team of students passionate about science, trying to find a solution for this problems was a duty call rather than simple challenge. Those space persons who are running many risks for science evolution deserve our attention. The least thing that we could do is to brainstorm, design, and develop a project that can serve as a tool for them to help them overcome these problems.
Project Development Approach:
The approach that we used while developing this project was the agile project management approach. After we listed the requirements to meet, we developed a roadmap to reach our final version of the software. The roadmap was developed so that we will be able to deliver a working system at any stage of the software development.
Each team member was assigned a part of the project to develop and design. However, Team meetings were held with a frequency of at least 2/3 hours to discuss the progress, evaluate the developed system, and suggest other alternatives.
Once a small building block of the system is developed, all team members evaluate it and suggest better alternatives to improve it.
This way, we were able to reach an advanced stage of our project development life cycle.
Technology Stack Used:
The programming languages and the tools used in developing this project were chosen so that the final system can be reliable, usable and execution fast. We used C++ to code the the embedded system in the smart watch and the microcontroller inside the the astronaut bedroom. The microcontrollers used were Arduino Un and Arduino Uno.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Requirements of our project was mainly based on NASA and its partner agencies resources.
To understand the problem of circadian misalignment, we used the following article: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/nasa-research-reveals-biological-clock-misalignment-effects-on-sleep-for-astronauts.
In order to get an idea about how to improve sleep of astronauts in our project, we needed the following article: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/astronauts_improve_sleep
Through this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICCuD4M9nIs , we could have an idea about the astronaut's bedroom and see what technology devices can be implemented on it.
Through this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ikouWcXhd0 , my team and i could have an idea about how exercising is done in a space station. We were able to see the exercising machine and that our system can get some data from it.
Through this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGR3FiEkBwA , we could see how astronauts eat and what they eat. Most of the food is processed food from which we can get nutritional value. Therefore, we were assured that tracking astronauts diet is feasible.
Project Demo
https://github.com/teamhackaton/Space_APP_comp/tree/main/Demo-solo
Project Code
Data & Resources
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/nasa-research-reveals-biological-clock-misalignment-effects-on-sleep-for-astronauts
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/astronauts_improve_sleep
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICCuD4M9nIs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ikouWcXhd0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGR3FiEkBwA