Make Your Own Cycle.

Our team Ethioprogrammers consists entirely of high school students and we have chosen to develop a handy sleep shift scheduling application in response to the fatal issue of reduced productivity and fatigue experienced by Astronauts and space flight controllers during working hours.

We believe that we relate to this problem as we all learn in the same challenging high school in Addis Ababa and have experienced disrupted sleep cycles – be it in a smaller amount. As we came across this challenge, we were inspired by our own shared high school experience to come up with a possible solution.  

Issue – Astronauts and other shift workers suffer from increased health risks as well as compromised productivity during working hours because of circadian misalignment.

Our Solution – We can use input information from the user to design a custom – made day!

Even though people on earth can rely on their natural circadian entrainment to decide when to wake up and when to go to sleep, Astronauts and Shift Workers are faced with the challenge of unusual sleep timings caused by their work shifts. We have devised a way to custom make the user’s day, and all daily activities such as meal, exercise and sleep, to train the body to follow a different sleep and wake cycle than that we are usually accustomed to.

Our application – Sleepronize – utilizes the user’s regular bed time and work shift information to compute a specific schedule and keep up with the user’s circadian rhythm using countermeasures such as altering meal content, sleep time and suggestion of specific prescribed medication in accordance to the user’s changing sleep cycle.

In Conclusion, Sleepronize is an application intended to synchronize all daily activities with the frequently changing sleep cycle of the user – hence the name Sleepronize- so the user can keep up with his/her internal body clock and alter it in a way that maximizes productivity and eliminated fatigue.

Problems faced and potential improvements under development.

The most prominent problem we faced was that it was difficult to design an algorithm that was flexible for the schedules but in the end, we were able to conquer it. Sleepronize currently suits Astronauts and Space flight controllers best. However, we hope to improve its feature to incorporate other users such as international travellers and other people with varying sleep cycles in the user pool. We are still working out some areas of the app; we are hopeful that it will work to its full capacity.