MorpheusRD - Space Apps Challenge

MorpheusRD| Sleep Shift Scheduling Tool

Awards & Nominations

MorpheusRD 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.

GoSleep

Summary

GoSleep is a platform that consists of a mobile app and a web-based app. The web-based app will be used by an administrative personnel member, who will register the users and give the user-related sleep information, will create the missions and give the necessary inputs and dates when creating the mission; also mission's members will be added. Mission members include the crew members, the mission control, and any other staff needed for the mission. He will also be able to see overall information about mission members' sleep. The mobile app will be used by the mission members, where they will be able to see their schedule, log sleep times and quality, meal and exercise information.

How We Addressed This Challenge

What did you develop?

We designed a platform consisting of a web-based mobile app for the administrative personnel of a mission, and a mobile app for all the mission members. We also implemented the scheduling algorithm that calculates times.

Why is it important? What does it do? How does it work? What do you hope to achieve?

It takes the mission inputs/dates and schedules bed and wake times to reduce the circadian misalignment. The calculation is based on whether we want to advance or delay the circadian rhythm, and day by day we adjust the wake and bedtime. Based on research, we also schedule metalin taking, and exposure to sunlight or bright artificial light. The user also logs eating time, exercise time, and sleep. For creating metrics and adjusting the schedule, we prompt the user with some questions based on the Liverpool jetlag questionnaire, the Columbia jet lag scale, and the Stanford Sleepiness Scale/ We hope to minimize the effects that jetlag brings with it, so that crew members and any other

How We Developed This Project

What inspired your team to choose this challenge?

Sleep is a very important aspect of our lives. As college students, we often have a big lack of sleep, and we often know how it feels to be tired, foggy, woozy, and in the need of a BIG nap. The ultimate tool against this issue is organizing our days and scheduling. We found the creation of a tool to do precisely that very interesting. With the addition of astronauts, crew members and for anyone who would experience circadian misalignment, we found an interesting challenge where we would learn a LOT (we did).

What was your approach to developing this project?

The first thing we did was to familiarize with the challenge. We read about circadian rhythm and how to measure it; circadian misalignment, and how to perform circadian entrainment. We read some papers about experiments made for shifting the circadian rhythm and reducing the time to do it when adapting to a new time zone. After doing the research, our next step was to brainstorm ideas on what the features of our tool will be. We then made the UX flow for the app and raw mockups. The next step was to fully create the high fidelity prototype, while at the same time we did an extra research on how the scheduling algorithm was going to be, followed by the implementation of it.

What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project?

For the design of the high fidelity prototype we used Adobe XD.

For the implementation of the scheduling algorithm, we used the Dart programming language.

UX prototype: https://xd.adobe.com/view/a37f8d03-4164-4073-54f8-82861b6c3890-d54e/screen/61c1ff71-59fe-4224-852b-167cd36d8aa5

What problems and achievements did your team have?

We did not know what the circadian rhythm really was and how the effects of having it misaligned with the environment are decreased. So, we had to inform ourselves a LOT. A problem we had was that during the brainstorm, sometimes the discussion went towards design and UX details that could be discussed later when designing it, so we lost time that could have gone towards discussing aspects on how to perform the scheduling. When it comes to time, we had issues integrating the meal and exercise, as well as other commodities such as exposing to light, to the scheduling algorithm. In terms of achievements, the bigger achievement was all the learning we had.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used an example sleep schedule for a mission control officer, also a list of the available foods on the ISS, as well as information about the needed proteins and energy for astronauts. The schedule example helped us see how the circadian rhythm adjusting was made in a real situation.