Harmony - Space Apps Challenge

Harmony| Sleep Shift Scheduling Tool

Awards & Nominations

Harmony has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Sleep Shift Scheduling Tool

Sleep loss and fatigue may lead to reduced performance and an increased risk to safety during many activities, including spaceflight. Your challenge is to develop an operational sleep shift scheduling tool that provides autonomous customization of a schedule for sleep, exercise, and nutrition to manage fatigue.

Harmony application

Summary

We created an application that combines all mentioned aspects of sleep, exercise, and nutrition and utilized them to manage fatigue. Taking in consideration circadian rhythm, age, those who suffer from delayed sleep phase syndrome, people travelling through different time zones, those who want to reset there biological clock, those who are trying to find their optimal sleep hours, those who work night shifts, astronauts, space industry and non-space industry workers, we created a user-friendly app that helps you get your life back on track considering your personal situation. With a special nutrition, exercise database for astronauts and another for space and non-space industry workers.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed an application that combines all mentioned aspects and organizes your life in accordance to your desire.
Our unique value proposition is:

The first application to provide organization and customization of all three aspects: sleep, exercise and nutrition.
The application covers a wide spectrum of audiences and the general public could also use it.
The application gathers information from the user and then utilizes it to give him the advice appropriate for his case, it will be a lot more personalized and accurate using AI.
We are constantly developing and adding new features to the application such as( the following includes what we hope to achieve):

Making the application available on smart watches, so as to reach a larger audience and help make the application more efficient ( i.e. getting better feedback from the user as to when they slept and when they woke up and their sleeping status disturbed or undisturbed).
Developing a medication schedule function to help those who have prescribed medicines by their physician take those medicines regularly and in harmony with other daily activities, meal times and exercise times.
Enhancing the application using artificial intelligence using Microsoft azure platform.
Developing a function for those who suffer from allergies to exclude the direct forms of what they're allergic to. Later on when our AI is trusted enough ( using supervised and unsupervised machine learning for different sectors), the application will also exclude foods that have the product the user is allergic to in them. The function could also be used to help those with chronic diseases such as diabetes.
It would also help you reach your target if you're trying to lose or gain weight or even stay the same way you are. The exercises are also going to be organized in accordance to difficulty (i.e. beginner, intermediate and advanced) and target (i.e. lose weight, stay toned, gain muscle).
Adding sleep music function that plays soft music for 15 minutes and automatically turns off to help you sleep calmer.
Adding functions and sensors to help the application interact with the environment, for example: if the optimal temperature for sleep is 20 degrees Celsius, the application would be able to detect your surrounding temperature and advise to change it if it doesn't match the temperature required for optimal sleep.
Adding a meditation sector as a nightly routine of 30 minutes an hour before sleep to help clear your mind, reduce insomnia and help astronauts limit the use of sleeping pills.
Turning the application using the aforementioned tools along with future ideas into a life companion, rather that just an application.

How We Developed This Project

What truly inspired us to choose this challenge is that it affects everyone, everyone experiences fatigue. It could cost us human lives and enormous amounts of money, for example, the Chernobyl disaster took place on a night shift. Healthcare personnel suffer due to their disturbed schedules, the list could truly go on forever. Not only does the challenge include a large spectrum of audiences, but it also gives us the chance to help humanity on an international scale as well as an extremely personal one. So many accidents, mistakes, disasters could be avoided using an application like this.
Our approach to the challenge was distributing our focus on all audiences equally, and then finding an integrated solution to all mentioned problems through our large and to be expanded database. Afterwards, we're going to see which audience uses the application the most and develop more features tailored towards that audience, as well as using the application for astronauts on three stages,

Using it for astronauts on the ISS and troubleshooting the problems they provide us with feedback about
Using it for astronauts orbiting the moon ( a lunar orbit), for further troubleshooting and better assumptions about the problems that are about to face us on the journey to Mars.
Using the application for astronauts on their journey to Mars to assist them and provide a better User Experience for them.
The rest of details about our approach is provided in the resources tab (i.e. the food database, astronauts data base, all sleep scheduling tips, exercise details for space industry and non-space industry workers and for astronauts.

Project business model:
The tools we used:

UI and Design: figma
Coding: flutter
Database: MySQL

The problems we faced are:

The scarcity of usable data when it comes to astronauts, we had to do a lot of research and filtering to get the precise data we needed
We had so little time but we did our best, pulled about four all-nighters of all of us working, rehearsing, designing and modifying our work to get everything done

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

NASA data was used to know everything about astronauts and help build the app ( i.e. their sleep schedule, how many hours they need, what prevents them from sleeping well such as looking out the copula window before sleep time, improper sleep environment, etc.. It also helped us develop the special food database from which we excluded what they cannot eat ( see resources), as well as how much exercise they need per day, the challenge that's going to face them on the journey to Mars ( see challenge details in resources). Thus, helping us provide a better user experience with more accurate solutions.