BlackMoon| Sleep Shift Scheduling Tool
Sleep Shift Scheduling Tool
Dynamic Sleep Scheduling System
Summary
Project aimed to develop a self scheduling system to optimally arrange the sleep shifts,exercise ,food consumption routine giving them better working performance,solving sleep loss and fatigue.The system is aided by monitoring band to track health status, sync data to system.System schedules base on priority and time with AI algorithm.Whenever users have a shifted sleeping time, the system will detect it and slowly set it back to the personalized preferred sleeping time.The system will auto switch to warmer color temperature light on ISS induce sleep.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Sleep is one of the most crucial functions needed by the body in order to recharge and refresh our mind to stay alert. Healthy sleep also keeps the body strong from diseases. Sleep loss and fatigue may lead to reduced alertness and increased risk to safety, especially on the international space station ISS that is far away from Earth.
Circadian rhythm is defined as natural internal body progress that helps to regulate the daily sleep-wake cycle. Lack of sleep can also disturb an astronaut's body circadian rhythm (biological clock), which may cause health problems as well as mood changes. In fact, it is hard for the astronauts to get proper treatment in the space. Based on the research by NASA published in 2016, shows a healthy lifestyle such as exercising, reducing screen time at night, and eating with a proper diet can maintain a healthy sleep schedule and circadian rhythm.
On-orbit sleep causes many difficulties for the astronauts to sleep, which is detrimental to their health as well as their safety during flight missions. Evidence has consistently shown that disturbed sleep is common to the astronauts. Indeed, there are three-quarters of the astronauts take medication for six months' mission in the space. The quality and duration of the sleep of astronauts are adversely affected by a combination of special factors such as microgravity, noise, emergency work, jet lag, and abnormal light-dark cycle as they orbit the Earth.
We have developed a system that helps users to reschedule from sleep shifted cycle back to normal. The system allows additional tasks or emergency input, such as landing, docking, or undocking task to be priorities. The higher priority will overlap the lower priority task. This will cause the person to shift essential tasks such as sleeping and exercising. The problem of shifting sleeping schedule will cause insomnia or sleeping habits to be disorganized. Without better sleep during the scheduled time, it will cause a performance drop during working hours. It is crucial for the people who are experiencing jet lag.
The system is a desktop application that allows the user to input the preferred time and activities, or it will auto collect data from the wearable smart device to estimate the user's preferred time for sleep, exercise, and eat. It identifies the user's circadian rhythm to act as a base scenario to readjust and schedule-timeline when the user experience jet lag or insomnia. For example, if a user experiencing jet lag, their sleeping time will be affected. Therefore, they will have to adjust back to their normal body clock with the help of scheduling tools for a better result if they strictly follow the suggested schedule.
Furthermore, the dynamic scheduling application will also give suggestions and recommendations to improve health conditions. For Astronauts, the wearable is integrated with a barcode scanner to scan the barcode on every food in the International Space Station to keep track of the astronauts' nutrient consumption. The data will be sent to the existing ISS FIT Apps to record efficiently. With the help of the wearable smart device, exercise and fitness also will help the overall circadian synchronization, which allows the system to identify when is the best time for exercise, which does not affect the sleep and provide better sleep quality. With the recommendation of the exercise needed and how much is enough for the nutrition intake to get optimal exercise amount.
The system will automatically reschedule the overlapped timer to another time and take priority into consideration. It will calculate the amount of time that affected the sleep and suggest a power nap to fill in the gap to ease the tiredness. We hope to achieve it in an enhanced program and run more efficiently with an easy to use interface and highly integrated Artificial Intelligence back end algorithm to schedule the task given to the astronauts and keep the essential task as their preferred time to match their circadian rhythm.
How We Developed This Project
The main reason our team chooses this challenge because this topic is relatable to our daily life. Not only the astronauts but people on the Earth, including us, also experience sleeping difficulties due to some similar disturbances such as environmental, workload, emergency, and so on. The common factor that people on Earth and astronauts face for insomnia is because of the circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is essential in maintaining the human's healthy sleep. Thus, these problems urged us to find the solution in order to solve theirs as well as our problems as healthy sleep are required in keeping our body fit.
Besides, we are interested to know deeper about how an astronaut sleep in the space. Due to the absence of gravity in space, our sleep pattern is significantly different from the astronauts. In fact, the astronauts are floating while they are sleeping. The cycles of light and dark are also different from those on Earth, which contribute to the major problem for the astronauts to maintain their biological clock. Thus, their sleep quality will be affected.
Before solving this problem, we have found the root causes that affect humans as well as astronauts' sleeping quality. We have gathered much researches and information about the background of an astronaut living in the space from trusted websites – NASA and experienced astronauts. After understanding their background and difficulties, we brainstormed different possible methods that help them improve their sleeping quality. All the methods are revised based on the objective, potential consideration stated in the challenge, and existing technology of NASA itself.
We have come out with the best solution: Dynamic Sleep Scheduling System. This system is a combination of smart applications with a wearable monitoring band that keeps tracking the health data from the astronauts. The data will be transferred to a centralized database to process the health condition of each astronaut. The user can easily access their health condition in the space as their health is the most priority. All the algorithms and operating principles are well-explained in the demonstration of the video.
For the prototype, the monitoring band was developed with a heart rate sensor and display monitor integrated with a micro controller. The micro controller was programmed with Arduino IDE. However, the prototype is not the final product of the system. The design of the band was created with CAD software (Solidworks) and presented in the video.
The purpose of the monitoring band is to collect the data from the user. These data will be utilized by the software smart sleep scheduling system that allows the shifting schedule, which keeps the condition of the user optimized. This software interface was designed using Adobe XD.
The main problem that we faced during the development of the system is time management. As this team consists of a different group of students with different expertise, it is hard for us to arrange a time that meets everyone's availability. However, this problem was solved because of everyone's passion for solving this issue together that we willing to sacrifice our time and effort to make this project possible.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Based on the experiment data on sleep monitoring obtained from Frost, James D., Jr. The experiment concluded where sleep losses would result in performance decrements. In these instances, under important circumstances, the use of hypnotic drugs must be used to promote sleep in order to increase alertness following with sleep loss. Hence, this experiment shows that night of proper sleep and day to day schedule must be properly considered in order to have better rest in which translates to better working performance. By using this statement, we decide to develop a dynamic sleep scheduling system that will optimally schedule a comfortable daily schedule that focuses on the good quality of sleep.
Based on the experiment conducted by Czeisler, Charls A, on the sleep-wake actigraphy and light exposure during spaceflight, the objective of the experiment was to analyze the factors that affect the sleep disruption, misalignment of the circadian phase during the space flight. The result of the experiment shows that 12 out of 16 crew members on ISS were using sleep-promoting drugs to promote sleep, and crew members reported less sleep per night during flight missions as compared to the post-flight mission. By using this result, we decided to develop a dynamic scheduler to tackle the irregular sleeping time that will affect the circadian rhythm by using a dynamic shifting technique scheduler to slowly scheduling the irregular sleeping time to the preferred sleeping time. This method will slowly change back to the ideal preferred sleeping pattern from the irregular sleeping time. By having better sleep, this also increases the performance of the working crew and the general health of a person.
Project Demo
https://youtu.be/CVMDQIGoisw
Data & Resources
Barger, L., n.d. Najor Scientific Discoveries. Huston Tx: NASA.
Czeisler, C. A., 1999. Sleep-Wake Actigraphy and Light Exposure During Spaceflight (DSO 634), Johnson Space Center: NASA.
Frost, J. D. J., 1974. Sleep Monitoring (M133), NASA Johnson Space Center; Houston, TX: NASA.